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THE DEVELOPMENT 



OF 



Modern Religious Thought 



ESPECIALLY IN GERMANY 



EDWIN STUTELY CARR, A.M., D.B. 



OCT 19 iB95j^7 /e 

<%QSTON AND^CJHICAGO 

Congregational SttnUag-Scfjoal ano ^ubltsfjtng £orictg 



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copyright, 1895, 
By Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society. 



TO 

MY FATHER 

WHOSE ASSISTANCE AND ENCOURAGEMENT MADE POSSIBLE 
MY YEARS OF POST-GRADUATE STUDY 



CONTENTS, 



FIBST PEBIOD. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 

PAGE 

Christianity originally a moral system 1 

Impulse to theology 2 

Aristides the Philosopher 2 

Justin Martyr 3 

Alexandria, birthplace of theology 3 

Origen's system a philosophy . . 4 

Clement . . 5 

Gregory Thaumaturgus 6 

CHAPTER II. 

ORIGEN. 

Criteria of Truth 8 

Doctrine of God 9 

Son as Word or Wisdom 10 

Soul's fall as in Phaedrus 12 

All to be restored 14 

The Incarnation a fascinating problem 16 

Freedom of Will 17 

Importance and Value of Origen's System 23 

CHAPTER III. 

AUGUSTINE. 

Facts of his life 25 

Teachings lacking in unity and consistency 29 



ii Contents. 

PAGE 

Criteria of Christian Truth 31 

Doctrine of God 34 

Doctrines of sin and grace 37 

Pelagius and his doctrine 37 

Fall in Adam 39 

Condition of infants 40 

Freedom of will 42 

Letters to monks of Adrumetum 45 

Predestination 48 

Perseverance ; did Adam possess it ? 50 

Evil necessary in universe 51 

Christ and the Holy Spirit 52 

Doctrinal extremes due to philosophical spirit ... 54 

Religious feeling made Augustinianism possible ... 55 

Augustine and Schleiermacher at one in essence ... 56 

Great system-; monistic 56 

Augustine and Aristotle 57 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE RENAISSANCE. 

Rome under Pope Leo X 59 

Reforms of Augustine and Luther 60 

Ascetic ideal of middle ages 60 

Republics of Northern Italy 63 

Enthusiasm for classical learning 60 

Development of art 67 

Italian politics 68 

Brutalized rather than humanized 70 

Savonarola 71 

CHAPTER V. 

THE REFORMATION. 

Reformation moral rather than doctrinal 75 

No new type of theology 81 

CHAPTER VI. 

THE THEOLOGY OP THE REFORMERS. 

German Theology 83 



Contents. iii 

PAGE 

Martin Luther 83 

Augsburg Confession 87 

The Eucharist 90 

Luther and Erasmus on the will ........ 92 

Union of Church and State 96 

Zwingli 99 

Calvin 100 

CHAPTER VII. 

POST-REFORMATION MOVEMENTS. 

Opposition to predestination 103 

Formula of Concord 103 

Inspiration of Scriptures 105 

Arminian controversy 107 

Methodism not consistently Pelagian 112 

Protestant scholastic period 113 



SECOND PERIOD. 
CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTION TO SECOND PERIOD. 

Historical introduction 117 

Scientific introduction 120 

Philosophical introduction 125 

Parallel of Greek philosophy 134 

State of religion in Germany 136 

Deism, Materialism, Rationalism 140 

CHAPTER II. 

LEIBNITZ AND WOLFF. 

Wolff and the Pietists 142 

Leibnitz 144 

Wolff 149 

Orthodox Wolffians . . . . = 155 



iv Contents. 

CHAPTER III. 

THE AUFKLARUNG. 

PAGE 

Mendelssohn 159 

Reimarus 161 

Lessing 166 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE FAITH PHILOSOPHY AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 

Hamann 171 

Jacobi 372 

Goethe and the Romantic School 174 

CHAPTER V. 
Kant 177 

CHAPTER VI. 
Hegel 190 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE RATIONALISTS. 

Semler 211 

Rohr 213 

Paulus . 213 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Schleiermacher 215 

CHAPTER IX. 

THE HEGELIAN SCHOOL. 

Baur 234 

Strauss 235 

Biedermann 211 

Green's Hegelianism 241 

Feuerbach 246 

O. Pfleiderer 246 



Contents. v 

CHAPTER X. 

THE NEW ORTHODOXY AND THE NEW LUTHERANISM. 

PAGE 

Harms 249 

Hengstenberg 251 

Stahl 252 

CHAPTER XI. 
Neander and Weiss 254 

CHAPTER XH. 

THE MEDIATING SCHOOL. 

Dorner 260 

Rothe 263 

CHAPTER XIII. 
The Ritschlian School 265 

CHAPTER XIV. 
Conclusion 270 



INTRODUCTION. 

This little work is the outgrowth of graduate 
studies originally undertaken for my own intel- 
lectual satisfaction, and with no definite plan of 
adding to the immense theological literature of 
our time. The impulse to this line of reading 
was received from the lectures of Professor George 
P. Fisher of Yale, on the History of Doctrine — the 
most interesting and stimulating course of my 
seminary years. A fourth year at Yale, and a 
year in Heidelberg and Berlin, with subsequent 
reading, furnished the materials for the most 
part and developed the general theory of the work. 
An appointment as Williams Fellow in Harvard 
Divinity School, giving access to the Harvard 
libraries and to the many advantages of lectures 
and personal advice from instructors, made it pos- 
sible to bring my conclusions to final literary 
expression. 

My general problem in the work is to explain 
historically the origin of the prevalent skepticism 
which denies the miracles and the supernatural 
claims of Christianity, ridicules its " other-worldly " 

vii 



viii Modern Religious Thought. 

character, and would establish a kingdom of 
happiness for men on earth instead of in heaven. 

This tendency to emphasize the worth and dig- 
nity of man and to question the need and the 
validity of a divine revelation I have character- 
ized as the Greek spirit. It is the worldly wisdom 
which Paul condemns, and it is at enmity with the 
spirit of Christianity, whether it appears in Origen 
or Pelagius, Kant, Hegel, or Schleiermacher. It 
is the source of the scientific assumption of the 
uniformity of natural law, which, as I endeavor 
to show especially in Strauss, begs the question 
as to the miraculous contents of the Scriptures. 
I choose the field of German religious thought to 
illustrate these truths, because the development 
of the principles is there clearly marked and easily 
followed ; and German thought is now the leading 
influence in the theological world. 

It will be seen that my plan in the work is to 
contrast the opposing Greek and Christian ten- 
dencies in the three forms they have assumed in 
Christian history : (1) With Origen and Augus- 
tine ; (2) in Calvinism (or Lutheranism) as opposed 
to Arminianism; (3) in the so-called liberal and 
conservative schools of this century. In the 
Renaissance period this contrast is very striking, 



Introduction. ix 

for it appears unmistakably as the struggle of 
the Greek spirit with the Christian. This being 
my plan, it seems to me advantageous and 
even economical of space to give a thorough 
discussion of Origen and Augustine, with whom 
the opposing tendencies appear in their early and 
most characteristic form. This plan is most ad- 
vantageous because, in discussing the first (Augus- 
tinian) period of German theology, I can dismiss 
the different theologians with a brief statement, 
suggesting merely the individual variations from 
the Augustinian type. And the same holds true 
largely of the second period in relation to Origen. 
As the first period of German thought is Augus- 
tinian, so the second may be said to be Greek 
(Origenistic}. The development of liberal thought 
culminates in Hegel ; and Hegel's Christianity, 
as Kaftan well says, is simply Origen's Logos doc- 
trine stripped of its traditionally Christian 
features. 

And, further, the fact that in writing a history 
of modern liberal thought I can profitably devote 
a great portion of my space to the early fathers 
is a suggestive illustration of an important fact; 
namely, that the boasted discoveries of modern lib- 
eralism are for the most part ancient history, and 



x Modern Religious Thought. 

that the Christian Church has prospered in the 
past (and will probably continue to do so in the 
future), not by accepting, but by rejecting and 
combating these alleged discoveries. 

It is apparent, of course, that the treatment of 
the theology of the present century is very cur- 
sory, and that many distinguished names are not 
mentioned. This was necessary from the limit 
of space, but may be a real advantage, as it may 
make the general movement of thought more readily 
apparent to the reader, than if he were confused 
with a maze of names and details. While a few 
of the most prominent thinkers — as Augustine, 
Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher — are discussed with 
a considerable degree of fullness, the work in 
general is concerned with principles rather than 
men. It may be full euough for the layman who 
wishes merely to know something of the general 
tendency and final result of modern religious 
thought ; bat I hope the principal use of the work 
may be to impel theological students to further 
reading and serve them as a guide through the 
tangled field of German theological literature. 

My thanks are due to the instructors in the 
Harvard Divinity School whom I heard last year 
in this general field — to Professor Francis G. 



Introduction. xi 

Peabody, for his valuable course in the Philoso- 
phy of Religion, and to Professor John E. Russell, 
of Williams College, not only for his course on 
"The Ground and Content of Christian Faith," 
but for personal criticisms and suggestions. Pro- 
fessor Russell's keen and discriminating discussion 
of Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, in the course 
just mentioned, was of the greatest assistance to 
me, and has affected at almost every point my 
estimate of these great thinkers. 

I divide the subject-matter at the Aufklarung 
into two general periods. During the first period 
theology is determined, formally and materially, 
by traditional churchly and scholastic principles ; 
in the second period religious thought undergoes a 
profound modification in form and content, re- 
sulting from the changed social, ethical, and philo- 
sophical conditions of modern times. The divid- 
ing point which I assume is more or less arbitrary 
and of course somewhat indefinite. The eighteenth 
century is the battleground of the old orthodoxy 
against the characteristic principles of modern 
culture. The latter gradually work out to clear 
expression in Kant and Hegel, and are formally 
introduced into the theological field by Schleier- 
macher. 



xii Modern Religious Thought. 

A note is added at the end of the book, giving 
a brief historical discussion of the Greek Logos 
doctrine. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT, ESPE- 
CIALLY IN GERMANY. 



FIRST PERIOD. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF 

MODERN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 

/CHRISTIANITY first appeared as a matter 
^-^ essentially of the heart and moral life — en- 
thusiastic love for a crucified Saviour, the redeemer 
from sin. Its early teachers had small respect for 
the intellectual speculations of worldly men : " Let 
no man make spoil of you through his philosophy 
and vain deceit " (Col. 2:8). It was impossible, 
however, that the Church should long occupy this 
position, as Christianity spread throughout the 
Roman world and came into permanent relations 
with Greek and Roman culture. Thoughtful men 
in the Christian community felt impelled to bring 
the new truth in Christ into harmonious relations 
with their whole mental life, and became restive 
under the disdainful assertions of the learned that 
Christianity was a barbarous superstition to which 
only fools were called. Hence the attempt to 

1 



2 Modern Religious Thought, 

employ the Christian revelation as a means for 
reaching speculative truth — that is, transforming 
it from a moral to an intellectual system — and to 
commend it to the learned as the highest and final 
philosophy. The impulse to make clear to him- 
self and exhibit in systematic form the content of 
his faith and its relation to other spheres of truth 
is a natural and necessary one for an intelligent 
Christian — the source and justification of theol- 
ogy. This attempt, however, manifests a constant 
tendency to obscure the moral elements of Chris- 
tianity and run out into a one-sided intellectual- 
ism. Especially was this true in the conditions 
existing in the early Christian centuries, when the 
world of thought was a chaos of effete religions 
and disintegrating philosophies confusedly min- 
gled with theosophic speculations and ascetic 
superstitions from the Orient. 

Early in the second century (123 A.D.) Aristides, 
an Athenian philosopher, presented to the Emperor 
Hadrian an apology for the Christian faith, which 
is said to have borne the title, " To the Emperor 
Hadrian Cassar, from the Philosopher Aristides 
of Athens." 1 The union of Oriental and Chris- 
tian elements produced various heresies, as the 

1 Harnack, I, p. 378. 



The Rise of Christian Theology. 3 

Gnostic ; but "the best Christian thinkers always 
found Greek philosophy, especially the Socratic, 
kindred in its aim and spirit because of its lofty 
and pure ethical conceptions. The earliest extant 
apologies, those of Justin Martyr, commend the 
Christian religion to the emperor-philosopher, 
Antoninus Pius, by comparing Christ to Socrates 
and representing him as incarnate reason. " And 
when Socrates endeavored, by true reason and 
examination, to deliver men from the demons, then 
the demons themselves, by means of men who 
rejoiced in iniquity, compassed his death as an 
atheist and profane person ; and in our case they 
display a similar activity. For not only among 
the Greeks did reason (Logos) prevail to condemn 
these things through Socrates, but also among the 
barbarians were they condemned by Reason Him- 
self (Logos), who took shape and became man and 
was called Christ Jesus." 1 Christian theology, 
properly so called, found its birthplace at Alexan- 
dria, the seat of Philo's philosophy ; and the 
characteristic aim of the Alexandrian school of 
theology is to combine Christianity and the pro- 
found and fascinating speculations of the best 
Greek thinkers kito the final and perfect system 

1 First Apology, I, 5. 



4 Modern Religious Thought. 

of truth. The father of Christian theology, Ori- 
gen, in reply to Celsus, quotes his opponent as 
saying that " the Greeks are more skillful than 
any others in judging, establishing, and reducing 
to practice the discoveries of barbarous nations." 
Origen proceeds to remark : " Now this is our 
answer to his allegations and our defense of the 
truths contained in Christianity — that if any one 
were to come from the study of Grecian opinions 
and usages to the gospel, he would not only 
decide that its doctrines were true, but would by 
practice establish their truth, and supply whatever 
seemed wanting from a Grecian point of view to 
their demonstration, and thus confirm the truth of 
Christianity." 1 

In referring to the system of Origen, Harnack 
says : " It was at the bottom a philosophical 
system." 2 It is often remarked, and in the main 
truly, that the Eastern Church was predominantly 
speculative, the Western practical ; the first ten- 
dency leading to the development of theology 
proper — doctrines of God, person of Christ, etc. 

— the practical tendency of the West, on the 
other hand, to the development of anthropology 

— doctrines of sin and grace. Origen stands as 

1 Against Celsus, I, 2. 2 Outlines of History of Dogma, p. 318. 



The Rise of Christian Theology, 5 

the most conspicuous representative of the Eastern 
Church, which develops rather a philosophy than 
a theology ; while the great significance of Augus- 
tine lies in the fact that in him the practical ten- 
dency of the West finds true expression, yet is 
preserved from a one-sided extreme by a philosoph- 
ical temper and insight and a genuine and sym- 
metrical religious life. He brought theology back 
from the speculative extremes of the East, restor- 
ing it to genuinely ethical, religious ground — 
where the daring flights of speculation were 
restrained by the authority of the sacred Scriptures 
and of the true Christian tradition and Christian 
consciousness which he found in the Catholic 
Church. 

The ideal Christian with the Alexandrian 
School is the "wise man" (Gnostic), as in the 
purest Greek ethical schools, the Socratic and the 
Stoic. Clement, the teacher of Origen, says : " It 
is the greatest of all lessons to know one's self. 
For if one knows himself, he will know God ; 
and knowing God he will be made like God, not 
by wearing gold and long robes but by well-doing, 
and by requiring as few things as possible." 1 
Religion is represented as essentially a matter of 

1 Instructor, III, 1. 



6 Modem Religious Thought. 

knowledge. " Could we, then, suppose any one 
proposing to the Gnostic whether he would choose 
the knowledge of God or eternal salvation ; and 
if these, which are entirely identical, were separ- 
able, he would without the least hesitation choose 
the knowledge of God, deeming that property of 
faith which from love ascends to knowledge, desir- 
able for its own sake." 1 The knowledge of God 
in mystic contemplation issues in a perfect union 
with God, after the thought of Philo and the 
Neo-Platonists. " What is really good is seen to 
be most pleasant, and of itself produces the fruit 
which is desired — tranquillity of soul. On this 
wise it is possible for the Gnostic already to have 
become God. . . . For, universally, liability to 
feeling belongs to every kind of desire ; and" man, 
when deified purely into a passionless state, 
becomes a unit. In the contemplative life, one in 
worshiping God attends to himself, and through 
his own spotless purification beholds God holily ; 
for self-control, being present, surveying and con- 
templating itself uninterruptedly, is as far as pos- 
sible assimilated to God." 2 Gregory Thaumatur- 
gus, the devoted disciple of Origen, writes of his 
master's use of the Greek philosophers in his 

1 Stromata, IV, 22. * Ibid. IV, 23. 



The Rise of Christian Theology. 7 

teachings : " He was the first and only man that 
urged me to the study of the Greeks. For he 
deemed it right for us to study philosophy in such 
a wise that we should read with utmost diligence 
all that has been written, both by the philosophers 
and poets of old, rejecting nothing (for indeed 
we did not yet possess the power of critical dis- 
cernment), except only the productions of the 
atheists." 1 

1 Panegyric to Origen, 11, 13. 



CHAPTER II. 



ORIGEN. 



I~N the preface of his great theological treatise, 
Uep\ 'Apywv, Origen sets up as criteria of Chris- 
tian truth, the Scriptures and apostolical tradition. 
" All who believe and are assured that grace and 
truth were obtained through Jesus Christ derive 
the knowledge which incites men to a good and 
happy life from no other source than from the 
very words and teachings of Christ " — the Scrip- 
tures of the Old and New Testament. . . . 
"Since, however, many of those who profess to 
believe in Christ differ from each other, . . . that 
alone is to be accepted as truth which differs in 
no respect from ecclesiastical and apostolical tra- 
dition." These two sentinels of Christian truth, 
however, posted so conspicuously at the gateway 
of the theological edifice, were unable to prevent 
the entrance of a vast deal entirely foreign to the 
thought both of Scriptures and apostles. This 
came about largely because of Origen's allegorical 
interpretation of the Bible — the method used by 



Origen, 9 

Philo in reconciling the Scriptures and the Greek 
philosophers. " Then, finally, there is one opinion 
throughout the whole Church, that the Scriptures 
were written by the Spirit of God, and have a 
meaning, not only such as is apparent at first 
sight, but another, which escapes the notice of 
most. This spiritual meaning is known to those 
only on whom the grace of the Holy Spirit is 
bestowed in wisdom and knowledge." 1 An inter- 
esting example of Origen 7 s allegorical theory is 
found in the "Principles," IV, 1 : 16 : " Who is 
so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner 
of a husbandman, planted a paradise in Eden and 
placed in it a tree of life, visible and palpable, so 
that one tasting of the fruit by the bodily teeth 
obtained life? And, again, that one was a par- 
taker of good and evil by masticating what was 
taken from the tree ? And if God is said to walk 
in the Paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide 
himself under a tree, I do not suppose that any 
one doubts that these things figuratively indicate 
certain mysteries, the history having taken place 
in appearance and not literally." 

It is not necessary to dwell on Origen's doctrine 
of God, except to note that it shows the unde- 

i Iiepl 'Apx<*v, Preface, 8. 



10 Modern Religious Thought, 

veloped nature of the trinitarian doctrine in his 
day. It is the subordination view, characteristic 
of Greek theology in general, rinding the ground 
of the divine unity in the precedence of the Father. 
"It is clearly delivered in the teaching of the 
apostles, first, that there is one God, who created 
and arranged all things, etc. Secondly, that 
Jesus Christ himself, who came into the world, 
was born of the Father before all creatures, etc. 
Then, thirdly, the apostles related that the Holy 
Spirit was associated in honor and dignity with 
the Father and the Son. But in his case it is not 
clearly distinguished whether he is to be regarded 
as born or innate (uncreated), or also as a son of 
God or not ; for these are points which have to be 
inquired into out of Sacred Scripture." 1 The 
trinitarian controversies of the third and fourth 
centuries do not concern us. Augustine deter- 
mined the form of the trinitarian doctrine for the 
Western Church, asserting the procession of the 
Spirit from both the Father and the Son. 

In his doctrine of the Son, Origen's emphasis is 
on Christ as the Word or Wisdom, through par- 
ticipation in whom creatures become rational. 
" God the Father bestows upon all existence ; and 

1 iiepL 'Apx&v, Preface. 



Origen. 11 

participation in Christ, in respect of his being the 
Word of reason, renders them rational beings. 
The grace of the Holy Spirit is present, that those 
beings which are not holy in their essence may be 
rendered holy by participation in it. . . . That 
those whom he has created may be unceasingly 
and inseparably present with Him Who Is, it is 
the business of Wisdom to instruct and train them, 
and to bring them to perfection by confirmation 
of his Holy Spirit and unceasing sanctification, by 
which alone they are capable of receiving God. 
In this way then shall we be able at some future 
time, perhaps, to behold the holy and blessed life 
in which we ought so to continue that no satiety 
of that blessedness should ever seize us — while 
we ever more eagerly and freely receive and hold 
fast the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. 
But if satiety should ever take hold of any one of 
those who stand on the highest and perfect sum- 
mit of attainment, I do not think that such an 
one would suddenly be deposed from his position 
and fall away, but that he must decline gradually 
and little by little." * This passage is essentially 
Platonic in thought, and the lucid and elegant 
style reminds of the poet-philosopher of Greece. 

1 Ilepi 'Apxiov, I, 3. 



12 Modern Religious Thought, 

Wisdom trains its pupils for the higher life, as the 
captives of the Cave figure of the Republic are 
led up to the ideal world ; and the fall of the hap- 
less spirits who tire of the ecstatic vision is a feeble 
echo of the Phsedrus. Substitute the vision of 
the world of ideas for " holding fast to the Father, 
Son, and Holy Ghost," and "the back of heaven " 
for "the highest and perfect summit of attain- 
ment," and you have the souls in the train of 
Zeus, coming out and standing on the back of 
heaven, to gaze out upon the world of ideas, when 
some through carelessness fall away, their wings 
are broken, and they descend to the world of sense. 
"For the immortal souls go out and stand upon 
the back of heaven, and the revolution of the 
spheres carries them around, and they behold the 
world beyond. . . . During the revolution the soul 
beholds justice, temperance, and knowledge abso- 
lute, not in the form of generation or of relation, 
which men call existence, but knowledge absolute 
in existence absolute. . . . But when the soul 
fails to behold the vision of truth, and through 
some ill-hap sinks beneath the double load of for- 
getfulness and vice, and her feathers fall from her 
and she drops to earth, then the law ordains that 
this soul shall pass in the first generation into that 



Origen. 13 

of a man." 1 This Christian Platonism of Origen is 
interesting and beautiful and may possibly be true; 
but this Logos — Wisdom — who leads his disci- 
ples up out of the disturbing cares of the world 
to serene heights of philosophic contemplation is 
not the Saviour of Paul, burdened with an awful 
load of moral guilt, and crying, " Who shall de- 
liver me from the body of this death ? I thank 
God through Jesus Christ our Lord." 

For Origen, therefore, the fall of man is in the 
preexistent state, instead of in Adam as with 
Augustine. Mortal being exists as a shadowy 
copy of the Divine Being, much as with Plato 
earthly things have only a derived existence by 
partaking of the nature of the idea. In the fol- 
lowing passage there seems to be also the sugges- 
tion of an analogy between the Trinity and 
Plato's god, the Idea of goodness. " For in the 
Trinity alone, which is the author of all things, 
does goodness exist in virtue of essential being, 
while others possess it as an accidental and perish- 
able quality, and only then enjoy blessedness 
when they participate in holiness and wisdom aud 
in divinity itself." 2 In falling from the heavenly 
state souls are assigned different grades of being, 

1 Pasedrus, Jowett, I, pp. 552 and 553. 2 ITepi 'Apx&v, I, 6. 



14 Modern Religious Thought. 

according to their moral desert ; some angels, 
some principalities, powers, thrones, etc. ; as with 
Plato, according as a soul has seen more or less of 
truth, it becomes a philosopher, king, politician, 
physician, etc. 1 All the fallen spirits are to be 
finally restored. " We think, indeed, that the 
goodness of God through his Christ may restore 
all his creatures to one end, even his enemies 
being conquered and subdued. . . . Those who 
have been removed from their primal state of 
blessedness have not been removed irrecoverably, 
but have been placed under the rule of these holy 
and blessed orders, that they may recover them- 
selves and be restored to their condition of hap- 
piness." In the chapter " On the End of the 
World," 2 Origen says : " I am of the opinion that 
the expression by which God is said to be ' all in 
all,' means that he is all in each individual per- 
son. Now he will be ' all ' in each individual in 
this way; when all which any rational under- 
standing, cleansed from the dregs of every sort of 
vice and with every cloud of wickedness com- 
pletely swept away, can either feel or understand 
or think, will be only God ; and when it will no 
longer behold or retain anything else than God, 

iPhaedrus, Jowett, I, p. 553. 2 Ilepl 'Apx^v, III, 6= 



Origen. 15 

but when God will be the measure and standard 
of all its movements." (We find here suggested 
Clement's Neo-Platonic vision of God and absorp- 
tion into the divine.) A full-fledged doctrine of 
transmigration is not lacking to prove Origen's 
loyalty to his master in philosophy :• " The souls 
having been for many ages, so to speak, improved 
by this stern method of training, advancing 
through each grade to a better condition, reach 
even to that which is invisible and eternal, having 
traveled through by way of training every single 
office of the heavenly powers." l He is uncertain, 
however, as to the restoration of the Satanic 
powers, anticipating Joseph Cook in suggesting 
fixedness of character as justifying eternal punish- 
ment. " But whether any of those orders who 
act under the government of the devil will in a 
future world be converted to righteousness, or 
whether persistent and inveterate wickedness may 
be changed by the power of nature into habit, is 
a result which you yourself, reader, may approve 
of." 1 In the chapter " On the Soul," 2 we 
might find Plato's doctrine of eternally exist- 
ing souls, as their origin is left entirely unex- 
plained ; the divine creation, however, elsewhere 

1 Ilepi. 'Apx<*>v, I, 6. - IT, 8. 



16 Modern Religious Thought, 

stated, 1 is doubtless assumed. " We have to 
inquire whether perhaps the name soul, which in 
Greek is termed <po%r h be so termed from growing 
cold out of a better and more divine condition. 
. . . From which it appears to be made out that 
the understanding (voD?), falling away from its 
status and dignity, was made or named soul ; and 
that if repaired and corrected it returns to the 
condition of the understanding." 

In the chapter " On the Incarnation of Christ," 2 
Origen promises to investigate " How and why 
Christ became man." Here again, as in Book I, 
Christ is the Logos, Reason ; his death is 
only significant as stimulating curiosity concern- 
ing the question of Christ's humanity, or as pre- 
liminary to the resurrection — the latter being a 
spectacular victory over the hosts of evil. We 
look in vain for any expression suggesting the 
tremendous moral conflict of a Paul, Augustine, 
or Luther, looking to the cross of Christ as the 
only hope of the sin-cursed soul. " We are lost 
in the deepest amazement that such a nature, pre- 
eminent above all others, should have divested 
itself of its condition of majesty and become 
man ; . . . but of all the marvelous and mighty 

111,1. 211,6. 



Origen, 17 

acts related of him, this is altogether beyond the 
power of mortal frailness to understand and feel — 
how that mighty power of divine majesty can be 
believed to have existed within the limits of the 
man who appeared in Judasa ; nay, that the wis- 
dom Qf God can have entered the womb of a 
woman, and have been born an infant, and have 
uttered wailings like the cries of little children ! " 

By far the greater part of the chapter is devoted 
to the discussion of the possibility and the limits 
of the union of the human and the divine in 
Jesus. Christ is to Origen a moral teacher like 
Socrates — his wisdom greater and more sure 
because divine, and his influence more potent and 
lasting because of his victory over death and hell 
and the continued working of his Spirit ; but the 
difference is one of degree rather than kind. 
Origen discusses the incarnation and life of 
Christ not with the spiritual earnestness of a 
conscious sinner, but as a student who finds here 
a magnificent and fascinating problem, historical 
and philosophical. 

In chapter i, Book III, the freedom of the will 
is discussed at great length. Origen's whole 
ethical system — moral self-development under 
guidance of the divine reason — presupposes 



18 Modern Religious Thought. 

human freedom, and the only point of difficulty 
for him is to explain the Scripture passages, espe- 
cially Romans ix. " Animate things are moved 
from themselves, a phantasy springing up in them 
which incites to effort. And in certain animals 
phantasies stir up the effort in an orderly manner, 
as in the case of a spider weaving. . . . The 
rational animal, however, has, in addition to its 
phantasial nature, also reason, which judges the 
phantasies, and disapproves of some and accepts 
others, in order that the animal may be led 
according to them. . . . Now, to fall under some 
one of those external causes which stir within us 
this phantasy or that, is confessedly not one of the 
things that are dependent upon ourselves, but to 
determine that we shall use the occurrence in this 
way or indifferently, is the prerogative of nothing 
else than the reason within us." Many Scriptural 
passages are quoted which exhort and command 
men to righteous living, and Origen concludes : 
" There are innumerable passages in Scripture 
which establish with exceeding clearness the 
existence of freedom of will." Considering the 
other aspect of the Biblical teaching, what of the 
hardening of Pharaoh? The illustration used in 
Heb. 6:7, 8 is the key to the difficulty. The 



Origen. 19 

same rain, falling on cultivated ground, produces 
fruit ; on the neglected and barren places, thorns 
and briars. " The same operation which was per- 
formed through the instrumentality of Moses 
proved the hardness of Pharaoh on the one hand, 
the result of his wickedness, and the yielding of 
the mixed Egyptian multitude who took their 
departure with the Hebrews." 

The punishment of Pharaoh is a salutary warn- 
ing as an exhibition of the divine justice ; and 
though Pharaoh loses his life in the Red Sea the 
result is not permanently serious, for Origen is a 
thoroughgoing probationist. " It is not without 
reason that he who is abandoned is abandoned to 
the divine judgment, and that God is long-suffer- 
ing with certain sinners ; but because it will be 
to their advantage with respect to the immortality 
of the soul and the unending world that they be 
not quickly brought into a state of salvation. . . . 
For God governs souls not with reference to the 
fifty years of the present life, but with reference 
to an illimitable age. . . . For souls are, as one 
may say, innumerable, and there is one only ad- 
mirable administrator who knows both the sea- 
sons and the avenues and the ways ; namely, the 
God and Father of all things, who knows how he 



20 Modern Religious Thought. 

conducts even Pharaoh by so great events, and 
by drowning in the sea, with which latter occur- 
rence his superintendence of Pharaoh does not 
cease. For he was not annihilated when drowned ; 
for 'In the hand of God are both we and our 
words.' " 

How does Origen deal with Romans 9 : 18-21 ? 

(1) Paul deals with men as though they possessed 
freedom, and in 2 Tim. 2 : 21 says : " If a man 
purge himself, he shall be a vessel unto honor." 

(2) Men largely determine their own characters, 
and, so far as they are shaped by external circum- 
stances, it must be remembered that their present 
condition is the result of the choices of the pre- 
natal life. " What absurdity is there in supposing 
that a more ancient cause for Jacob being loved 
and Esau being hated existed with respect to 
Jacob before his assumption of a body and with 
regard to Esau before he was conceived in the 
womb of Rebecca ? " 

Origen's system was open at both ends in 
respect to the earthly life. This fact enabled him 
to escape many difficulties which have proven so 
perplexing to later theologians, who must account 
for everything in the comparatively short interval 
between Adam and the day of the sinner's death. 



Origen. 21 

Having a prenatal period where sin originates, 
and an eternity of future time in which the infe- 
licities of the earthly life may be readjusted, his 
solutions of these questions are of little service 
to later thinkers where the conditions of the prob- 
lems are so very different. This wide difference 
in the conditions of the problems, however, sug- 
gests Origen's wide divergence from original, 
Scriptural Christianity, and the need of that theo- 
logical reformation which was accomplished by 
Augustine. 

Origen could not have satisfied himself, how- 
ever, with these philosophical vagaries of a pre- 
natal fall and an endless probation as solving the 
question of the will, if he had possessed a really 
profound view of human sin and the need of 
divine grace. His account of the work of Christ 
and the Spirit in the process of salvation is ex- 
tremely meager and unsatisfactory. The will of 
man is free ; his nature is essentially good, though 
he is the victim of ignorance and moral weakness ; 
he might possibly work his way back to blessed- 
ness unaided, but God has graciously sent the Son 
to hasten the process. Christ is the reason, in- 
structing men like a Greek philosopher; the 
Spirit's work is yet more uncertain in nature and 



22 Modern Religious Thought 

scope, being little more than the memory of 
Socrates in the minds of his disciples. He is 
rather at a loss to account for the Holy Spirit 
theoretically and practically, but accepts the exist- 
ence of the Spirit as taught in the Scriptures and 
by the Church, and concludes that as Christ makes 
men rational the Spirit makes them holy ; in con- 
flict with the implicit assumption underlying his 
system — the Socratic identification of knowledge 
and virtue. And it is further to be noted that if 
the will is to be at every moment free, in the 
sense of being as likely to choose evil as good, a 
most discouraging moral prospect is set before us. 
After having won our way, by infinite effort and 
after the lapse of ages, back to the blessed life, 
can we never be sure of persisting in that state, 
but are we in danger every instant of again 
swerving from rectitude and being obliged to 
begin again, Tantalus-like, the weary struggle 
after the vanished good? 

Origen is essentially Neo-Platonic in his view of 
matter. God is the only true essence, earthly 
matter is the fiij dv, appearance, having apparent 
reality as sustained by the divine power. 1 The 
Logos could not unite with a material body, as 

1 Harnack, I, p. 528. 



Origen. 23 

matter is essentially defiling ; but the union of 
the human and divine in Christ was mediated by 
a preexistent soul. Here is the theoretical ground 
of Origen's ascetic tendency, appearing in his 
self -mutilation and confirming the monastic move- 
ment in the Eastern Church. 

It should be said, however, in justice to Origen, 
that his system was infinitely superior to the 
crude and fantastic theories which were so numer- 
ous in his time, produced by a union of Chris- 
tian and heathen elements. It would be unfair to 
one of the strongest and purest champions of the 
cause of Christ, who gave his body to cruel tor- 
tures for his Master's name, if we should fail to 
recognize his broad culture, his candid and Chris- 
tian temper, and his vast service to Christian 
thought in giving his faith an exact systematic 
form. Although in consequence of the tendency 
of his time the philosophical in his system gained 
the preponderance over the strictly theological, 
this resulted from the worthy purpose to commend 
his faith to the culture of his age, and in giving 
his religion a Platonic form he combined it with 
the noblest philosophy of the ancient world. His 
system may be considered as the best representative 
of that form of Christianized philosophy which 



24 Modern Religious Thought. 

was produced by the first mingling of heathen 
and Christian thought, and as such forms an 
instructive contrast to the system of Augustine. 
I have dwelt at some length on Origen's system 
because we find in it one of the two great types 
of theology, and a thorough understanding of its 
characteristic principle will greatly facilitate our 
progress through the later history of religious 
thought. Whenever and wherever intellectual 
speculation, based on a non-Christian philosophy 
and unrestrained by a deep religious sensibility, 
gains the preponderance in Christian thought, the 
outcome is practically the same — a strong em- 
phasis of the dignity and freedom of man, which 
is destructive of the New Testament doctrine of 
salvation by the free grace of God ; and there is 
difficulty in accounting for Christ and the Spirit 
— Christ usually becoming merely a teacher who 
brings quicker and easier truth which men could 
have gained for themselves, and the Spirit a vague 
influence for inciting to moral resolution. This is 
in general true of this type of thought, whether 
appearing in a Pelagius or an Arminius, a Lessing, 
Kant, or Hegel. 



CHAPTER III. 



AUGUSTINE. 



/^VRIGEN and Augustine are separated by the 
^^^ space of two hundred years. " The doc- 
trinal and church history of the following centuries 
is in the East the history of the philosophy of 
Origen. The Arians and the orthodox, the critics 
and the mystics, the world-dominating priests and 
the world-forming monks could support themselves 
by Origen and did not neglect to do so," 1 and at 
length pretty well all parties, finding him no 
longer useful, united in declaring him a heretic. 
Yet his theology, as the first comprehensive and 
systematic exposition of Christian truth, though 
corrected and abandoned in details, was the model 
for succeeding systems and has left a permanent 
impress on Christian thought. The speculative 
tendency, conspicuous in Origen, found many and 
worse representatives in the following two centu- 
ries, and this tendency found an inexhaustible 
mass of attractive material in questions relating 

1 Harnack, I, p. 555. 

25 



26 Modem Religious Thought. 

to Christology and the Trinity. The violence 
and rancor of these controversies were rather 
intensified than diminished by the interference of 
the emperors, after Christianity became the state 
religion ; and when heresy became synonymous 
with treason, the evil consequences of theological 
divisions were rendered more serious and bloody 
by the intrigues of political ambition. As the 
result of these historic movements, Augustine 
found the professed followers of Christ split up 
into eighty or one hundred sects, 1 more energetic 
in combating each other than in overcoming their 
common foe of heathenism ; while the Roman 
bishop in the West and the metropolitan bishops 
in the East were contending for primacy as posses- 
sors of the true Christian and apostolic tradition 
and authority. The fall of the Western Empire, 
which seemed so disastrous, may have been a real 
benefit as freeing the Church from corrupting con- 
tact with the state ; but had not Augustine 
appeared just at this time, to restore Christianity 
to a Scriptural and a rationally churchly basis and 
gather the disintegrating elements of Christian 
doctrine into a compact and systematic form, we 
may well doubt, humanly speaking, whether the 

1 Schaff. 



Augustine. 27 

treasures of Christian truth and faith would have 
been preserved to modern times through the dark 
and stormy period of the middle ages. 

It is unnecessary to state at length the external 
facts of Augustine's life; his birth near Carthage 
of an un-Christian father and the pious Monica ; 
his unusual intellectual gifts which made him a 
man of commanding influence and a successful 
teacher of rhetoric ; his early life of immorality 
which was the shame and sorrow of his later 
years, and which he laments with the earnestness 
and pathos, and often in the language of the 
Psalmist ; his inquisitive mind drawing him to 
the Manichseans, and when their groundless pre- 
tensions to superior wisdom are exposed, his satis- 
faction in Plato's lofty speculations ; his relations 
with Ambrose at Milan, under whose influence he 
is converted, with tears and an agony of mental 
conflict which suggests the experience of Paul on 
the Damascus road ; his thorough consecration of 
his bodily and mental powers to the service of 
Christ and his Church — living a celibate life, 
preaching one or more times daily, enriching 
exegetical literature by numerous commentaries, 
employing his splendid dialectical and rhetorical 
abilities in combating the errors of Manichaeism, 



28 Modern Religious Thought. 

Donatism, and Pelagianism ; until at last, while his 
episcopal city of Hippo was besieged by the victo- 
rious army of the Goths, his noble and passionate 
spirit ascended from the tumults and alarms of 
earth to that divine rest to which he had long 
aspired. And indeed no person who wishes to 
understand and properly estimate Augustine 
should content himself with a second-hand discus- 
sion of his life and work. It is a cruel injustice 
to one of the greatest and most interesting per- 
sonalities of history to condemn his system 
because of some doctrinal extremes, and heap 
contempt on his character because of his early 
excesses, without such a study of his own works, 
especially the Confessions, as shall give some ade- 
quate conception of the intellectual strength 
hallowed and restrained by spiritual humility, the 
practical insight and administrative ability com- 
bined with an idealistic devotion to truth and 
holiness which mark this rich and many-sided 
nature. 

It is more difficult to give a concise and clear 
exposition of Augustine's teachings than in the 
case of Origen, for the former wrote no compre- 
hensive work like the Ilepl ^Apx<bv. His views are 
set forth largely in controversial writings, where 



Augustine. 29 

the discussion is rendered prolix and confused by 
reason of allusions and arguments of merely local 
interest and value. 

And as the doctrines of Augustine never came 
to complete and systematic expression in any 
single work, so they are lacking in unity and con- 
sistency among themselves. It is a common fact 
of experience and history that antagonistic opin- 
ions may repose quietly side by side in a man's 
mind, and this is especially true, perhaps, of great 
men whose vigorous mental grasp gives them a 
firm hold upon supplementary poles of truth. 
Having passed from a state of general religious 
doubt, through the speculations of the Manichseans 
and the Platonic philosophy into the faith of the 
orthodox Church, each of the stages of his intellec- 
tual and spiritual progress left its mark, more or 
less permanently, upon his thought and character. 
His writings composed near the time of his con- 
version show most clearly the influence of the 
Neo-Platonic philosophy, being an attempt to 
express his new spiritual experience in terms of 
his valued philosophy. In this early period and 
to a less degree through life, in setting forth his 
theological views he uses largely the traditional 
style and terminology of the philosophized Chris- 



30 Modern Religious Thought. 

tianity which Origen had made the ruling theo- 
logical influence, often apparently unconscious that 
the old theological forms were inadequate or con- 
tradictory to his altered doctrinal standpoint. 
He holds fast, as authorities of Christian truth, 
both the Scriptures and the teaching of the Church, 
assuming that these standards of truth are identi- 
cal in content, and leaving undetermined which is 
to be accepted in case of a conflict. He empha- 
sizes the doctrine of sin and the renewing grace 
of God as the essential groundwork of Chris- 
tianity, yet does not so subordinate all the doctrinal 
material to this principle as to free theology from 
the traditional form which identified salvation and 
knowledge. In his early controversy with the 
Manichseans he advocates the freedom of the will ; 
in the anti-Pelagian writings he denies it. His 
fundamental doctrine of salvation by free grace 
renders superfluous and perhaps injurious all monk- 
ish asceticism and ex opere operato view of the 
sacraments ; yet he advocates the one because of 
his earnest desire for personal holiness and for an 
impressive example of stainless Christian virtue, 
and the other in the interests of churchly order 
and unity of doctrine and practice. We may find 
in him points of resemblance to Lessing and 



Augustine. 31 

Schleiermacher — not a system maker but a sower 
of suggestive and fruitful ideas in widely separated 
fields of thought. 

Augustine lays great stress upon the authority 
of Scripture, quoting it constantly in all his doc- 
trinal discussions. His method of interpreting 
Scripture is much more sober and literal than 
Origen's, yet retains to some extent the allegorical 
method. " All that Scripture, therefore, which is 
called the Old Testament is handed down fourfold 
to those who desire to know it — according to his- 
tory, setiology, analogy, and allegory. Thus it is 
handed down according to history, when is taught 
what hath been written and what hath been done; 
what hath not been done, but only written as 
though it had been done. According to setiology, 
when it is shown for what cause anything is done. 
Analogy, when it is shown that the Old and New 
Testaments are not contrary the one to the other. 
According to allegory, when it is taught that cer- 
tain things which have been written are not to be 
taken in the letter, but are to be understood in a 
figure." l As an example of Augustine's allegoric 
interpretation the discussion of David's sin is 
noteworthy. " The literal David was guilty of 

1 Profit of Believing, 5. 



32 Modern Religious Thought, 

a heinous crime. On the other hand, He who was 
the desire of all nations loved the Church when 
washing herself on the roof ; that is, when cleans- 
ing herself from the pollutions of the world, and. 
in spiritual contemplation mounting upon her 
house of clay and trampling upon it ; and after 
commencing an acquaintance, he puts to death 
the devil (Uriah), whom he first entirely removes 
from her, and joins her to himself in perpetual 
union." 1 The orthodox Church Fathers were often 
at their wits' end to frame answers to the keen 
and satirical criticisms of the Manichseans, and it 
is not surprising that they were loth to surrender 
entirely the allegorical method which could dis- 
cover a wealth of edifying suggestion in the most 
unpromising material. 

In the work against Pelagius, 2 Augustine writes 
as though reason were to subject itself entirely to 
the authority of Scripture — a wide departure 
from the position of Origen. " Let us not suppose 
that human nature cannot be corrupted by sin, 
but rather believing, from the inspired Scriptures, 
that it is corrupted by sin, let our inquiry be how 
this could possibly have come about." And yet 
he speaks again 3 as though the Scriptures were 

1 Reply to Faustus, the Manichaean, XXII, 87. 2 Nature and Grace, 22. 
3 Christian Doctrine, I, 39. 



Augustine. 33 

merely a means for the development of faith, 
hope, and love in the believing subject who is 
then able to stand without their support. " And 
thus a man who is resting upon faith, hope, and 
love, and who keeps a firm hold upon these, does 
not need the Scriptures except for the purpose of 
instructing others." This idea seems to open a 
wide door to fanaticism, but reveals in Augustine 
that same depth of religious feeling which we 
find in the leading reformers, regarding the Bible as 
the external standard of faith yet seizing its spirit- 
ual contents, making them its own and so feeling 
able to stand independently of the written Word. 
Another authority and standard of Christian 
truth is the Catholic Church. Augustine's intel- 
lectual struggles caused him to estimate highly 
any legitimate aid to faith, and his grand concep- 
tion of the city of God existing in eternal power 
and majesty in contrast to the decaying Roman 
state, made it easy for him to clothe the Church 
with an authority, the pernicious consequences of 
which were entirely hidden from his eyes. In his 
work "On the Profit of Believing," (20) he 
exhorts Honoratus, "If now you seem to have 
been tossed to and fro enough, and wish to put an 
end to labors of this kind, follow the pathway of 



34 Modem Religious Thought 

Catholic teaching, which hath flowed down from 
Christ himself, through the apostles, even unto us, 
and will hereafter flow down to posterity." The 
Catholic Church is " most true mother of Chris- 
tians." " Christ has given the keys to his Church, 
that whatsoever it should bind on earth should be 
bound in heaven, etc. ; that whosoever should 
believe and should repent and turn from his sins, 
should be saved by the same faith and repentance 
on the ground of which he is received into the 
bosom of the Church." 1 We find here the beauti- 
ful presentation of the ideal Christian order, 
where faith feeds upon the Christ of the Scrip- 
tures, and the Church mirrors the same Christ in 
life and sacrament and preached Word. But what 
confusion and disaster ensues, and how the body 
of Christ is rent asunder, when the fanatic exalts 
his faith, the Romanist his church, and the Prot- 
estant his Bible, — each in one-sided antagonism 
to all other standards of truth. 

His early view of God is colored by his Platonic 
associations, and is practically that of the eternal 
and ineffable being, to be reached by ecstatic 
vision ; as in the passage describing the spiritual 
experience of his mother and himself at Ostia. 

* Christian Doctrine, 1, 18. 



Augustine, 35 

The following is a characteristic specimen 
of this early period, displaying the verbose and 
artificial style of the Latin rhetorician of the late 
Roman period, yet ennobled by a profound and 
genuine religious feeling, and giving an insight 
into his strongly emotional nature : — 

" O God, Framer of the Universe, grant me 
first rightly to invoke thee ; then to show my- 
self worthy to be heard by thee ; lastly, deign 
to set me free. God, who hast not willed that 
any but pure minds should know the truth ; God, 
the Father of truth, the Father of wisdom, the 
Father of the true and crowning life, the Father 
of blessedness, etc. Henceforth thee alone do I 
love, thee alone I follow. Thee alone I seek, thee 
alone am I prepared to serve, for thou alone art 
Lord by a just title, and of thy dominion do I 
desire to be. Hear me, hear me, graciously hear 
me, my God, my Lord, my King, my Father, 
my Cause, my Hope, my Wealth, my Honor, 
my House, my Country, my Health, my Sight, 
my Life!" 1 

In his severe conflict with religious doubt he 
anticipated Descartes' "cogito ergo sum" and 
henceforth found his faith as a fact of inner expe- 

1 Soliloquy, I. 



36 Modern Religious Thought. 

rience to be studied and analyzed, and conse- 
quently as a window opening out to God. "In 
respect of these truths I am not at all afraid of 
the Academicians who say, ' What if you are 
deceived?' For if I am deceived, I am." 1 
Hence the knowledge of self (yv&fti ^aordv') is for 
Augustine, as for Clement and Origen, the way to 
knowledge of God, but in a genuinely Christian 
sense. In this devout study of inner experience 
Augustine was led to many observations of the 
inner life which are distinct and valuable contri- 
butions to psychological science — especially in 
his discussions of memory and the will. Augus- 
tine developed and stated for the Western Church 
the doctrine of the Trinity, finding in the human 
mind analogies to it. " For we both are, and 
know that we are, and delight in our being and 
our knowledge of it." 2 For his religious sensi- 
bility God is by preeminence goodness and love. 
"For love of thy love, do I this." 3 Yet his 
Platonic preconceptions linger, making God the 
one substance, over against which nature is 
scarcely more than an appearance, and the higher 
spiritual experiences of the Christian have to his 
thought the form of the ecstatic vision. 

1 City of God, XI, 26. 2 Ibid. XI, 26. 3 Confessions, XI, 1. 



Augustine. 37 

We have now to consider the group of doc- 
trines which are especially associated with the 
name of Augustine — universal sinfulness because 
of Adam's fall and consequent bondage of the 
will to evil, and the eternal punishment of all 
except a comparatively small number who are 
converted through the work of Christ and the 
Spirit, for no merit of their own, but in conse- 
quence of God's eternal purpose to manifest his 
attribute of mercy in relation to a chosen few. 

This group of doctrines came to final form and 
expression with Augustine in connection with the 
Pelagian controversy. Pelagius was a monk com- 
ing originally from Britain probably, and living 
for the most part in and about Rome. He was a 
man of earnest moral purposes, but of no very 
profound religious experience or intellectual 
power. He was familiar with the masters of 
Greek philosophy, a sympathetic student of 
Origen, and he was in general well fitted to 
become the champion of that compound of Aris- 
totelian-Christian and Stoic-popular philosophy 
which prevailed largely among the cultured Chris- 
tians both in the East and in the West. The good- 
ness and justice of God were emphasized ; what- 
ever God has made must be essentially good; 



38 Modern Religious Thought, 

man's natural disposition and tendency is to 
choose the good ; choice of evil and continuance 
in it can be but a temporary state. Man's moral 
reformation is to be wrought out by an energetic 
exertion of his real and better nature, and to this 
an ascetic life is favorable. God's grace, mani- 
fested in Christ, always helps those who help 
themselves, which when sifted down to its kernel 
means practically, as with Origen, that the divine 
grace was operative in creating men good, and the 
Christian revelation illuminates human ignorance 
and stimulates its weakness to moral resolution. 
While urging men at Rome to live a moral life, 
Pelagius was often met by what he regarded as 
the unmanly and hypocritical excuse that error 
and sin are natural to man. It is said that he 
first came into conflict with Augustine by 
excitedly opposing Augustine's saying, " Give 
what thou commandest and command what thou 
wiliest," : as Augustine relates in the " Gift of 
Perseverance " (53). This superficial view of 
the religious world was in polar opposition to 
Augustine's deep experience of sin and grace, 
and aroused him to most energetic protest. 
Augustine's strong point in the controversy was 

i City of God, X, 45, 



Augustine. 39 

that if man is essentially good and can work out 
his own salvation, grace is denied and Christ died 
in vain. His weak point and the one of which 
Pelagius takes the best advantage is his view of 
nature — the oft-repeated question, " Who art 
thou that replies t against God ? " affording small 
relief to outraged reason and humanity, which 
inquires, " Why did God create the world if 
the mass of human beings are foredoomed to 
perdition?" 

Augustine differs from Origen in placing the 
fall into sin, not in a preexistent state, but in 
Adam, the father of the race. We find here a 
certain Platonic coloring which enables Augustine 
seriously to hold what seems to us the absurdity 
that all his descendants, being ideally present in 
Adam, were justly held answerable for his sin. 
" When Adam sinned by not obeying God, then 
his body lost the grace whereby it used in every 
part of it to be obedient to the soul. . . . As a 
consequence, whoever is born of the flesh has 
need of spiritual regeneration — not only that he 
may reach the kingdom of God, but also that he 
may be freed from the damnation of sin." 1 " Be- 
cause he forsook God of his free will he experi- 

1 On Forgiveness, I, 21. 



40 Modem Religious Thought. 

enced the just judgment of God, that with his 
whole race, which being as yet all placed in him 
had sinned with him, he should be condemned. 
Whence even if none should be delivered, no one 
could justly blame the judgment of God. That, 
therefore, in comparison of those that perish few, 
but in their absolute number many, are delivered, 
is effected by grace, is effected freely ; thanks 
must be given because it is effected, so that no 
one may be lifted up as of his own deservings, but 
that every mouth may be stopped and he that 
glorieth may glory in the Lord." 1 

The thoroughgoing nature of Augustine's doc- 
trine of depravity is made clear in reference to 
the condition of infants. All are sinful because 
of Adam's fall, and as such will forever perish 
unless baptized. " What, then, some one says, 
even the infant needs a liberator? Certainly he 
needs one. The witness is Mother Church her- 
self, who receives the child for washing, and 
either for dismissing him from this life freed, or 
nurturing him in piety. Recognize the misery, 
extend the help. By as much as they cannot 
speak for themselves, by so much more pityingly 
let us speak for the little ones. Certainly if the 

1 Rebuke and Grace, 28. 



Augustine. 41 

child could speak for himself he would repel the 
voice of opposition and cry out, ' Give me Christ's 
life ! In Adam I died ; give me Christ's life ; in 
whose sight I am not clean even if I am an infant 
whose life has been but one day on the earth.' " 1 
At one point, however, his rigorous consistency 
yields a little to his humanity. " It may be cor- 
rectly affirmed that such infants as quit the body 
without being baptized will be involved in the 
mildest condemnation of all. That person, how- 
ever, greatly deceives both himself and others 
who teaches that they will not be involved in 
condemnation." 2 However monstrous this doc- 
trine of infant damnation may seem to us, our 
estimate of Augustine in relation to it is greatly 
modified if we consider that he did not construct 
it as a speculative theory in the studious seclusion 
of his episcopal palace, but encountered the diffi- 
culty as a practical problem of his daily ministry, 
and his primary interest was not to consign the 
children#to perdition but to save them. If it is 
true that all, infants included, are lost sinners, and 
a child can be saved by so simple a rite as bap- 
tism, he is a dangerous Christian teacher who fails 
to raise the voice of warning, and he is a very 

1 Sermon, 293. 2 On Forgiveness, I, 21. 



42 Modern Religious Thought, 

unnatural parent who neglects this extremely 
easy and inexpensive method of accomplishing so 
desirable a result. 

The one and only way of escape from this uni- 
versal state of sinfulness is through the free grace 
of God revealed of Christ. The havoc wrought 
by sin is so great, the defect in human nature so 
radical, that man is of himself helpless to choose 
and follow the right unless made the recipient of 
the divine aid. Hence in the Pelagian controversy 
the doctrine of the freedom of the will was a 
prominent issue. Augustine held that in his 
present state man's moral nature is in confusion ; 
some impulses and aspirations to good move 
within him, but his predominantly evil tendency 
makes it impossible that these impulses should 
really gain the ascendency. The only result, 
therefore, can be a state of ceaseless and hopeless 
conflict, " When I would do good evil is present 
with me " — a state made painfully vivid to 
Augustine by memories of his conversion. 1 Ob- 
viously the only view of the will which Augustine 
can hold in consistency is the profound one that 
the ruling choice of the life must be either for 
evil or for good ; and as habit constantly tends to 

1 Confessions, VII, 17. 



Augustine. 43 

fixedness, the free and spontaneous service of God, 
lost in Adam, can be restored only by divine 
grace. This view restores unity to the moral 
character destroyed by the Pelagian view of the 
will as a series of ictic choices, and is in the main 
Augustine's theory. The ideal ethical condition 
is not a state of moral anarchy, but rather of firm 
allegiance to the wisest law. The Divine Being, 
infinitely powerful, yet also infinitely wise and 
good, is unable to choose the foolish and the 
wrong — not in consequence of a defect but of the 
perfection of his character. The aim of moral 
development is not liberty but bondage to the 
highest. Augustine shrinks, however, from push- 
ing to the extreme his denial of freedom to the 
unregenerate man ; for he feels that he is draw- 
ing perilously near to making God the author of 
sin, which " God forbid ! " He evidently felt that 
the doctrine of the fall of the race in Adam was 
bearing as much weight as he could safely put 
upon it, and feared the consequences of declaring 
that all are born the irresponsible servants of 
Satan, so that Adam's choice alone bars the way 
to the impossible conclusion that God is responsi- 
ble for the evil. Augustine therefore endeavors 
to prove that men still have power of choice so 



44 Modern Religious Thoiight, 

as to be responsible — though this freedom is 
extremely unsubstantial in character, and Augus- 
tine maintains it by a rather unworthy jugglery of 
the expressions " free from sin " and " free from 
righteousness." " Who of us would say that by 
the sin of the first man free will perished from the 
human race ? Through sin freedom indeed per- 
ished, but it was that freedom which was in 
paradise to have a full righteousness with immor- 
tality. . . . For free will in the sinner up to this 
extent did not perish — that by it all sin, especially 
those who sin with delight and with love of sin. 
. . . They are not, then, free from righteousness 
except by the choice of the will ; but they do not 
become free from sin save by the grace of the 
Saviour. . . . This will, which is free in evil 
things because it takes pleasure in evil, is not free 
in good things for the reason that it has not been 
made free." * 

However carefully Augustine may guard the 
point, yet his emphasis was so strong upon 
the sovereignty of God and the impotence of 
the sinner, and his doctrine of the freedom of the 
natural man was so incomprehensible in character, 
that his discussions and writings naturally enough 

1 Against two Letters of the Pelagians, I, 5, 7. 



Augustine. 45 

gave the impression that the unregenerate possess 
no freedom. Men therefore began to inquire, 
"Why continue the ghastly mockery of offering 
salvation to men incapable of accepting it — why 
rebuke the wicked or commend the virtuous?" 
These questions were raised by a company of 
monks in the North African city of Adrumetum, 
who were so seriously disturbed by the difficulty 
that Augustine addressed them two letters on the 
subject. He first quotes numerous Scripture pas- 
sages to show that man is free and responsible. 
" No man therefore when he sins can in his heart 
blame God for it, but every man must impute the 
fault to himself. Nor does it detract at all from 
a man's own will when he performs any act in 
accordance with God. Indeed, a work is then to 
be pronounced a good one when a person does it 
willingly ; then, too, may the reward of a good 
work be hoped for from him concerning whom it 
is written, c He shall reward every man according 
to his works.' " 1 He then takes up the other side 
and shows that faith and salvation are the free 
gifts of God, unmerited by any, "lest any man 
should boast." "If eternal life is rendered to 
good works, as the Scripture most openly de- 

1 Grace and Free Will, 4. 



46 Modern Religious Thought, 

clares, how can eternal life be a matter of grace ? 
. . . This question seems to me to be by no means 
capable of solution unless we understand that 
even those good works of ours which are recom- 
pensed with eternal life belong to the grace of 
God." 1 Augustine's own proper view of the will, 
however, finds pretty clear expression in chapter 
xxxi. " There is always within us a free will — but 
it is not always good ; for it is either free from 
righteousness when it serves sin, — and then it is 
evil, — or else it is free from sin when it serves 
righteousness — and then it is good. But the grace 
of God is always good ; and by it it comes to pass 
that a man is of a good will, though he was before 
of an evil one." I have no doubt that the passage 
in this letter which was most helpful to the monks 
of Adrumetum, in case they followed its sugges- 
tions, was that near the close : " Peruse attentively 
this treatise, and if you understand it, give God the 
praise ; but where you fail to understand it, pray 
for understanding, for God will give you under 
standing." Nevertheless the monks do not seem 
to have arrived at a very clear view of the matter, 
for one of them was reported later as saying that 
" no man ought to be rebuked for not doing God's 

1 Grace and Free Will, 19, 20. 



Augustine, 47 

commandments, but that prayer only should be 
made on his behalf." Augustine replies to this in 
a second letter on Rebuke and Grace. A man in 
sin should be rebuked, " for if such a one is called 
according to the purpose, beyond all doubt God is 
co-working for good to him even in the fact of his 
being rebuked." 1 Calvin well comments on these 
letters of Augustine : " Thus there is left to man 
such a free will, if we choose to give it that appel- 
lation, as he describes in another place, that he 
can neither be converted to God nor continue in 
God but by grace ; and that all the ability which 
he has is derived from grace." 2 

How are we to explain Augustine's obscurity 
and apparent lack of candor in relation to the free 
will of the unregenerate man ? Was it merely to 
defend his system from the reproach of the Pela- 
gians that he destroyed human responsibility and 
made God the author of sin ? Not entirely so, I 
think. He had known in his own moral life 
bondage to sin, yet with a consciousness that he 
ought to free himself and yet that he could not; 
and at length he had been given power from God 
to renounce evil and choose the good. He had 
thus harmonized in his religious feeling the polar 

1 Grace and Free Will, 25. * Inst. II, 3, 14. 



48 Modern Religious Thought, 

truths of bondage and responsibility, freedom and 
dependence on God. The facts of his freedom 
and responsibility during the tremendous struggle 
of his conversion remained always sure to his 
moral nature, however imperfectly he might be 
able to interpret and reconcile these facts from 
the theoretical standpoint. 

Augustine teaches that a definite and unchange- 
able number of souls are predestinated to eternal 
life, not on account of any merit of their own, but 
as vessels for the display of the divine mercy, while 
it is pretty distinctly taught on the other hand that 
the rest of mankind are predestinated to damna- 
tion as vessels of wrath. Augustine's primary pres- 
entation of predestination is in its positive aspect 
in relation to the elect, as with Paul in Romans viii, 
where is the joy and strength of dependence on 
God. "But sayest thou God's will concerning 
myself is to me uncertain ? What then ? Is 
thine own will concerning thyself certain to thee ? 
Since then both are uncertain, why does not man 
commit his faith, hope, and love to the stronger 
will rather than the weaker?" 1 But for most 
men the somber shadows of the negative doctrine 
make a far deeper impression than the alleged 

1 Predestination, 21. 



Augustine. 49 

* 
glories of the election to grace, so that to the 

average man the whole doctrine brings more of 
uncertainty and dread than encouragement. In 
the treatise " On the Soul and its Origin," x 
Augustine says : " The fact undoubtedly is that 
numberless infants pass out of the body (to 
eternal damnation) before they are baptized^ 
God forbid that I should cast about for any 
futile effort to dilute this stern fact " (as by 
asserting that original sin may be remitted with- 
out baptism). " I simply hold what I see the 
apostle has most plainly taught us : that owing to 
one man, all pass into condemnation who are born 
of Adam, unless they are born again in Christ, 
whom he has predestinated to everlasting life as 
the most merciful bestower of grace ; whilst to 
those whom he has predestinated to eternal death, 
he is also the most righteous rewarder of punish- 
ment, not only on account of the sins which they 
add to the indulgence of their own will, but also 
because of their original sin, even if, as in the 
case of infants, they add nothing thereto." Pre- 
destination to death is an inscrutable mystery, 
but " who art thou that repliest against God ? " 
" Let the vessels of mercy understand how freely 

iIV.6. 



50 Modern Religious Thought. 

mercy is offered to them because to the vessels of 
wrath, with whom they have common cause and 
measure of perdition, is repaid wrath, righteous 
and due." 1 Robert Burns' " Prayer of Holy 
Willie " may be suggested as the comment of 
common sense on this doctrine. 

In the case of the elect the gift of perseverance 
is added to that of predestination, so that it is 
impossible that they should permanently fall away 
from the Christian life. But how about Adam? 
Was the gift of perseverance a part of his moral 
perfection in Eden ? If so, how could he sin ? If 
not, how can he be held responsible ? And if he 
was not responsible, God is the author of sin and 
Augustine's system vanishes into thin air. Augus- 
tine discusses this point in " Rebuke and Grace," 2 
and very unsatisfactorily, giving a wordy and 
superficial comparison of Adam's fall with that 
of the evil angels. There is evidently no third 
alternative between the inexorable horns of the 
dilemma just stated, so that we find Augustine at 
last practically acknowledging the weakness of 
the crucial doctrine of the system, by obscuring 
it in a fog of dialectical verbiage. We shall see 
in considering Calvin's system that he sweeps 

i Against two Letters of Pelagius, VI, 16. 2 26-29. 



Augustine. 51 

away all such arguments as shallow and unmanly- 
subterfuges, and boldly declares that God predes- 
tinated Adam to sin. He is the one prominent 
theologian of the Christian centuries who has had 
the courage clearly to enunciate this doctrine, 
which to the average mind is subversive of all 
morality and faith. 

That Augustine's extreme emphasis of the 
sovereignty of God brought him into kinship 
with Calvin's view, appears in the idea that sin 
and evil have a proper and necessary place in the 
economy of creation. "As the beauty of a pic- 
ture is increased by well-managed shadows, so to 
the eye that has skill to discern it, the universe is 
beautified even by sinners, though considered by 
themselves their deformity is a sad blemish." 
The wickedness of angels and men " embellishes 
the course of the ages, as it were an exquisite 
poem set off with antitheses." 1 Hence we find 
the paradox that this system, which began with 
the strongest emphasis of the heinous nature and, 
to human strength, resistless power of sin, ends 
with the assertion that evil has its aesthetic and 
even its moral uses — bad in the concrete, but in 
its general cosmic aspect beneficial. It has always, 

i City of God, XI, 18, 23. 



52 Modem Religious Thought. 

however, been found difficult to preach this doc- 
trine with profit to the laity. 

Augustine's system presents to us enough of 
contradictions and obscurities, yet these elements 
give no ground for neglecting or disparaging the 
valuable and fruitful points which he presents; 
for this is the common case of every thinker who 
has sought to comprehend within the limits of a 
definite system the incomprehensible things of 
God and the world. Let us estimate him and his 
work in relation to that fundamental principle 
which is and must ever remain in some form the 
essential kernel of the Christian religion — salva- 
tion by faith in Jesus of Nazareth, rather than by 
any device of human wit or virtue ; a doctrine 
which so sadly needed emphasis in his day. Let 
us estimate him in relation to this doctrine, rather 
than to those intellectual perplexities in which he 
became involved, largely through loyalty to this 
central principle. In its central elements his 
system is sound and vital, consonant with the 
Scripture, Christian tradition, and Christian con- 
sciousness. It is perhaps the first great system in 
which the Christianity molds the philosophy, 
instead of vice versa. This fact appears in the 
last point in his system to which we must allude 



Augustine. 53 

— his doctrine of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Au- 
gustine has a real and important work for each of 
these divine persons to do ; Christ is a real Saviour, 
conquering the devil and liberating the captives, 
and the Spirit has a work of superhuman difficulty 
in restoring to goodness an obstinate will and a 
character hardened in evil habit. And it is to be 
noted that Augustine's interest in Christ is primari- 
ly moral rather than intellectual — he is in harmony 
as Origen is at variance with the first Christians in 
seeking and magnifying not primarily the Logos, 
Wisdom, but Jesus, " who should save the people 
from their sins." " How hast thou loved us, O good 
Father, who sparedest not thine only Son, but de- 
liveredst him up for us wicked ones ! . . . For us 
was He unto Thee both victor and victim, and the 
victor as being the victim ; for us was he unto Thee 
both priest and sacrifice, and priest as being the 
sacrifice ; of slaves making us thy sons, by being 
born of thee and serving us. Terrified by my sins 
and the load of my misery, I had resolved in my 
heart, and meditated flight into the wilderness ; but 
thou didst forbid me and strengthen me. O Lord, 
I cast my care upon thee ! Thine only Son — He 
in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and 
knowledge — hath redeemed me with his blood." 1 

1 Confessions. X. 43. 



54 Modem Religious Thought. 

It is evident, however, that many of the extreme 
and contradictory elements in Augustine's system 
are due to the influence of the Greek philosophi- 
cal spirit, from which it was impossible that any 
thinker in that age should totally free himself. 
The Greek demands that all shall be made clear. 
For his inquisitive science the darkness of mystery 
must be driven from every most minute crevice of 
the universe — a plausible guess is much better 
than a confession of ignorance. This intellectual 
temper finds in Christianity a new philosophy, 
which, if it is worthy of that name, — especially 
if it is of divine origin, — must furnish the key to 
all truth in earth and heaven. To men of this 
mental habit the doctrine of justification by faith 
rather than works cannot be substantiated except 
by showing its necessary relation to all possible 
facts and persons. His harsh and contradictory 
doctrines flow for the most part from the attempt 
to make clear to the intellect those fundamental 
moral antinomies which can be apprehended only 
in religious feeling. He is largely successful in 
clearing the atmosphere of the lower theological 
region, but it is by the hazardous method of 
gathering all the clouds of mystery into the 
sphere of the divine. As interpreted by the aver- 



Augustine, 55 

age mind, the heavenly Father becomes the re- 
mote, cloud-enthroned despot, of resistless power 
and superior to the laws of reason and morality ; 
directing all things to the spectacular display of 
his glory, supremely indifferent to all the woe and 
tears and tragedy of human life ; the counsels of 
his will, terrible and relentless, smiting men out 
of the darkness like the secret decrees of the 
English Star Chamber or the Venetian Council of 
Ten — a situation ominous for the succeeding 
theological development. 

How could men develop and advocate systems 
so repugnant to reason and feeling as the majority 
of mankind find the Augustinian and Calvinistic 
systems? Calvin was a lawyer, determined at all 
hazards to construct an invincible case against 
the Romish doctrine of works, and cut it up at 
the roots. Paul, Augustine, and Luther, however, 
the men from whom this type of theology origi- 
nated, were men of strong religious feeling, who 
found their hope and joy for this life and the life 
to come in the faith that all is in the hands of 
God. Their deep religious sensibility made them 
certain, first, of personal salvation, and second, 
that the good God would do all for the best. But 
later men, less intense in emotional nature, were 



56 Modern Religious Thought. 

not so sure of either of the points just mentioned 
— hence Pelagianism and Arminianism. For if 
a man takes such a system seriously and has any 
doubt as to either of these points, it becomes a 
frightful instrument of torture. The common 
run of men either do not take these systems 
seriously or deny their validity. 

In essence Augustine and Schleiermacher are 
one — religion is the feeling of dependence on 
God. The form is different : one, Christian, Scrip- 
tural, churchly, objective ; the other, pantheistic, 
philosophical, subjective ; and they begin at differ- 
ent ends — the one with God and the other with 
man. Yet the inner principle is the same — glad 
and peaceful resignation of all into the hands of 
the all-powerful and all-good God. The extreme 
forms of resignation appearing in the two systems 
are in a way similar ; the first willing that self 
and friends should be damned for the glory of 
God ; the second not demanding a conscious per- 
sonal immortality — readiness to lose one's self in 
God, willing submission to self-annihilation. 

One source of the wide influence of Augustine's 
system doubtless lies in the fact that the great reli- 
gious and philosophical systems have been monis- 
tic. This applies especially to modern thought, 



Augustine. 57 

since matter and spirit are more clearly distin- 
guished than in the ancient world. It applies in 
a somewhat different sense to the Greek systems, 
for Greek philosophy as a whole is more or less 
distinctly monistic. The dualism of Plato and 
Aristotle is more apparent than real. Plato's 
Ideas and Aristotle's Prime Mover exist apart from 
the world, while world-soul and world, body and 
soul, constitute a unity and practically do all that 
is done. 

In modern thought, influenced by Christianity, 
the strong emphasis of personality in man intro- 
duces a real dualism. Here is perplexity and 
confusion for philosophy and science. What shall 
be done to obtain a unity which shall group all 
things harmoniously under itself? Three courses 
are possible : (1) God alone truly exists and 
operates; theory of Augustine, Calvin, Spinoza, 
Hegel. (2) Man alone may be assumed ; (a) 
Fichte's Ich ; (b) materialism, denying God and 
Spirit ; (c) ignoring God, who becomes an un- 
known x, as with Spencer. (3) The apparent 
dualism may be accepted as real, the attempt 
being made to define the limits of the divine and 
human power and activity — Pelagianism, Armin- 
ianism. 



58 Modem Religious Thought. 

The first assumption (1) produces the strong 
systems, attractive to vigorous minds because of 
their rigorous consistency — as Lessing regarding 
Spinozism as the only philosophy. Yet the 
thinkers seldom yield complete allegiance to these 
systems, and the common mass of humanity are 
persistently, unconsciously, and invincibly dualistic. 

The name of Augustine is of the greatest sig- 
nificance for the whole European world ; not only 
in relation to its theology, but to almost every 
department of philosophy, science, and culture. 
Siebeck 1 draws an interesting and suggestive 
parallel between Augustine and Aristotle — the 
latter as the characteristic spirit of the Greek 
world ; the former as the thinker who first became 
essentially emancipated from Hellenic thought 
and introduced a genuinely Christian type of 
speculation. This comparison is of interest in 
passing from Augustine to the Reformers. Luther 
regarded Aristotle as his most powerful and dan- 
gerous enemy in the field of thought, for the ruling 
tendency in the Roman church as he found it was, 
under the influence of the Renaissance, to reduce 
Christianity to an Aristotelian-Pelagian philosophy. 

1 Harnack, III, p. 95. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE RENAISSANCE. 

"YTTHEN Leo X was made Pope he said to 
Giuliano (duke of Nemours) : ' Let us 
enjoy the papacy since God has given it us.' It was 
in this spirit that Leo administered the Holy See. 
The keynote which he struck dominated the whole 
society of Rome. At Agostino Chigi's banquets, 
prelates of the Church and apostolic secretaries 
sat side by side with beautiful Imperias and 
smooth-cheeked singing boys ; fishes from Byzan- 
tium and ragouts of parrots' tongues were served 
on golden platters, which the guests threw from 
the open windows into the Tiber. Masques and 
balls, comedies and carnival processions filled the 
streets and squares and palaces of the Eternal City 
with a mimicry of pagan festivals, while art went 
hand in hand with luxury. It seemed as though 
Bacchus and Pallas would be reinstated in their 
old realm, and yet Rome had not ceased to call 
herself Christian. The hoarse rhetoric of the 
friars in the Coliseum mingled with the Latin 

59 



60 Modern Religious Thought. 

declamations of the Capitol and the twang of 
lute-strings in the Vatican. Meanwhile amid 
crowds of cardinals in hunting dress, dances of 
half-naked girls and masques of carnival bacchan- 
tes, moved pilgrims from the north with wide, 
astonished, wof ul eyes — disciples of Luther, 
within whose soul, as in a scabbard, lay sheathed 
the sword of the Spirit, ready to flash forth 
and smite." * 

We have seen how Origen distorted original 
Christianity by pouring it into the molds of the 
Platonic philosophy ; we have now to consider 
the revival of ancient learning which made an 
Epicurean philosophy and ethics practically 
supreme in the Italian church. The former was 
followed by the reformation of theology by 
Augustine, the latter by the Reformation, not so 
much theological as moral, of Luther. 

I have said that Augustine was the first thinker 
who became essentially emancipated from Hellenic 
thought, and introduced a genuinely Scriptural 
and Christian type of mental and moral life. 
The ascetic tendency of the early Christian cen- 
turies — a reaction from the moral pollutions of 
paganism — and the calamitous condition of the 

1 Symonds, Age of the Despots, p. 399. 



The Renaissafiee. 61 

Christian world during the barbarous Middle 
Ages, brought into prominence those teachings of 
Christ and the apostles which emphasize the cor- 
rupt and perishable nature of the present world. 
The science and learning of antiquity were more 
and more neglected as superfluous or pernicious. 
Why should a wretched sinner, on the crumbling 
verge of eternal perdition, waste the flying years, 
given for prayer and penance, in studying the 
plants and bugs or even the suns and stars of a 
world soon to melt forever in the fires of an 
universal conflagration? Why- should he who 
possessed the final and perfect truth in the Holy 
Scriptures concern himself for the vain and empty 
speculations of human reason ? Soon this indif- 
ference to ancient learning, aided by the general 
decay of letters in Western Europe, produced a 
state of ignorance which veiled almost completely 
the glories of that early world of culture. 
Augustine, in the latter part of the fourth cen- 
tury, knew little or no Greek, and the study of 
this language was more and more neglected, so 
that the scant learning of the Middle Ages was 
dependent upon such of the Greek masterpieces 
as had been translated into Latin, or had reached 
the Western world in more or less corrupt Arabic 



62 Modem Religious Thought. 

versions. The logic of Aristotle was the one 
Greek work which was in general use and author- 
ity, because its abstract forms could be filled with 
a specifically Christian content, and be employed 
in bringing the Church doctrines to clearness and 
consistency* And, furthermore, this medieval 
type of thought not only darkened and circum- 
scribed the intellectual life, destroying the dignity 
and worth and free activity of the mind, but also 
placed the natural appetites and feelings of man- 
kind under the ban of corruption and sin — 
poisoning at its source the most copious fountain 
of human happiness. The monk was exalted as 
the ideal ; participation in the business and 
struggle of worldly living and in the relations of 
the family life was a concession to human weak- 
ness, admissible only for persons unable to rise 
to the nobler and holier state of the cloister. The 
thought of the age takes concrete form in St. 
Simon Stylites, on his pillar, year after year, — 

" Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer, 
Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sins," 

indifferent to the streams of humanity which flow 
by on their predestined way to misery and destruc- 
tion ; or in St. Anthony, in his gloomy cavern 



The Renaissance, 63 

with skull and crucifix, fighting in never-ending 
struggle an imagination emptied of pure and 
wholesome objects and consequently peopled by 
images of voluptuous beauty. This view of life 
was possible only in a semi-barbarous society, 
where native appetite and brute impulse were 
more potent than abstract theory. It was gener- 
ally assumed that a plain and practical man was 
not expected to live up to the Christian ideal, and 
he therefore paid little attention to religion till 
the approach of death and the purgatorial fires 
brought him a suppliant before the altar of the 
Church — a useful institution in such emergencies. 
When permanent governments emerge from the 
political chaos of the Middle Ages, when war 
gives place to peaceful industry and commerce, 
and men begin to illuminate and adorn life with 
art and letters, such a religious system must be 
either reformed or abandoned. 

These conditions began to be realized in north- 
ern Italy about the eleventh century. There 
appear here a number of independent republican 
states — usually single cities or small confedera- 
cies of cities and towns — which played a part in 
the history of modern culture not unlike that of 
the cities of Greece in antiquity. In their 



64 Modern Religious Thought. 

struggles against their hereditary feudal lords the 
people were usually aided by their bishops, and 
it was the long conflict of the Church with the 
emperors which furnished the cities the opportu- 
nity and the means for securing a practical inde- 
pendence. Their geographical situation — at the 
gateway of Italy, between the papal territories on 
the south and the German empire on the north, 
so that they were constantly courted by both 
parties in the struggle — developed in these cities 
a free and self-reliant spirit which prepared them 
for the most ambitious enterprises. Their loca- 
tion was also favorable for commerce with all 
parts of the world, and the result was a rapid 
accumulation of wealth and a general movement 
towards a broader culture and a more refined and 
luxurious life. In his strong sense of individual- 
ity the Italian of that period resembled the 
ancient Greek, and the outcome was not unlike 
among the two peoples. Neither people was ever 
welded into a political unit by a sentiment of 
genuine nationality, and their political history is 
the record of the wars of petty commonwealths 
and the suicidal conflicts of rival factions, never 
stilled until foreign domination brought that 
peace which is the stagnation of death. Such 



The Renaissance. 65 

conditions, however, seem best adapted to produce 
the most remarkable results in the shortest time. 
Every man and every community is alert and 
active, clear of eye and quick and sure of hand, 
and while the eager rivalry crushes the weak in 
ruthless fashion, the strong and fortunate push on 
to the greatest achievements. In the ferment of 
this eager life, the traditional churchly doctrine 
and view of life was quickly tested and found 
wanting. Men were seeking the solid and the 
worthy in every field of activity, grasping in their 
own hands the realities of life, and seeking the 
deepest fountains of satisfaction and enjoyment. 
There was an impatience, amounting to disgust, 
with respect to all that was shallow and partial 
and unreal, and a demand for a life, practical and 
theoretical, which should be full-orbed and sym- 
metrical. These Italians were the heirs of the 
dim traditions of Roman greatness which had 
penetrated through the darkness of the interven- 
ing centuries, and they were always proud to be 
reckoned as the subjects of the Roman empire, 
however remote the connection between the exist- 
ing state and the grandeur of the storied past. 
In the fragments of Roman literature, art, and 
architecture they possessed, and in the literary 



66 Modern Religious Thought. 

monuments of Greek antiquity which were made 
known to them at this time, they found sugges- 
tions of the broader and richer life they were 
seeking. They found here a life, an earthly life, 
serene and sunny, unclouded by fears of an angry 
God or an endless hell ; a virtue which meant 
manhood, self-respect, high ambition, and noble 
endeavor, instead of the contemptible weakness 
and indolence and self-abasement of the starveling 
monk ; they found an ideal of free and harmoni- 
ous activity, of enjoyment of all earthly good and 
beauty, which to the thought of the Renaissance had 
produced a golden age in the past, and need only 
be studied and reproduced to make old earth bloom 
again with the flowers and fruits of Paradise. 

The result was a most extraordinary enthusiasm 
for the learning and art of antiquity. And all 
this enthusiasm was needed for the gigantic task 
before them. They set to work for the mastery 
of the Greek language with few and fragmentary 
Greek manuscripts and without grammars, lexi- 
cons, or classical dictionaries. The drudgery of 
the elementary work done by these Italian scholars 
was something prodigious, and places modern cul- 
ture under a lasting debt of gratitude. Late in 
the fourteenth century, the Greek Chrysoloras, 



The Renaissance, 67 

said to have been the most accomplished and elo- 
quent Hellenist of his age, was induced to come 
to Florence to teach Greek in the university. In 
his " Commentaries " Leonardo Bruni, a distin- 
guished scholar, tells of his early struggle as to 
whether he should abandon the law for the study 
of Greek. " I reckoned it a crime to omit so 
great an occasion of learning the Greek literature ; 
and oftentimes I reasoned with myself after this 
manner: Can it be that thou when thou mayest 
gaze on Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes, together 
with other poets, philosophers, and orators, con- 
cerning whom so great and wonderful things are 
said, and mayest converse with them and receive 
their admirable doctrine — can it be that thou 
wilt desert thyself and neglect the opportunity 
divinely offered thee? Through seven hundred 
years no one in all Italy has been master of Greek 
letters ; and yet we acknowledge that all science 
is derived from them. Conquered at last by these 
reasonings, I delivered myself over to Chrysoloras 
with such passion that what I had received from 
him by day occupied my mind at night in hours 
of sleep." 1 

The rapid and splendid development of art at 

1 Symonds, Revival of Learning, p. 110. 



68 Modem Religious Thought. 

this period finds no parallel in history except in 
the age of Athenian glory. The fragments of 
Greek sculpture were studied as ardently by the 
artists as the fragments of ancient manuscripts 
by the literati, with the result that Italian art, 
which was held in the service of the Church, 
became constantly more natural and human, and 
to an almost corresponding degree less religious. 
The gaunt and haggard saints of early Christian 
art became the Greek athletes of Michael Angelo, 
and the angular and ugly Madonnas were trans- 
formed into the radiant and lovely womanhood of 
Titian's " Assumption." 

The ancient ideals were exalted in every sphere 
of life. The passive virtues of Christianity were 
despised, as proper to the spiritless and slovenly 
monk ; and virtue took on the Roman sense — 
manhood, self-assertion, conquest. The man of 
the age did not aim to be honest, upright, and 
brave, but clever and successful ; not vice and 
crime, but simplicity and failure were to be 
avoided. Politics was the business of most men 
of spirit in those stirring days when a bold and 
unscrupulous leader might hope to make himself 
ruler of some Italian city or principality; and 
politics was the art of intrigue, deception, and 



The Renaissance. 69 

murder — reduced to a system in Machiavelli's 
Prince. The popes were among the princes of 
Italy by reason of their possession of the papal 
territories, and it is curious to note that when 
Machiavelli seeks examples of his ideal prince 
he finds them at the papal court. He bestows 
the infamy of his praise upon Pope Alexander VI 
and his son Caesar Borgia. " I know not what 
better precepts to display before a new prince 
than the example of his (Caesar's) actions." 1 
" It is of great consequence to disguise your 
inclination, and play the hypocrite well. Alex- 
ander VI never did nor thought anything but 
cheating, and never wanted a matter to work 
upon ; and though no man promised a thing with 
greater asseveration and confirmed it with more 
oaths and imprecations, and observed them less, 
yet understanding the world well he never mis- 
carried." 2 

The strong and weak points of the papacy as 
a temporal principality were thoroughly under- 
stood by the politicians of the time. It was to be 
regretted that the Pope was unable to name his 
successor, and hence could not provide securely 
for the future of his children and dependents, 

1 Prince, chap. vli. 2 Ibid. chap, xviii. 



70 Modem Religious Thought. 

especially as the former were of uncertain name 
and social standing. Caesar Borgia is said to 
have intended to secularize the papacy and make 
it hereditary ; but the stupidity or rascality of the 
servant who gave the poisoned cup to Alexander 
instead of to the man the pope intended to mur- 
der, brought all these brilliant projects to a sudden 
period. Machiavelli sets forth the advantages of 
the papacy in the Prince, chap, xi : " There re- 
mains nothing of this nature to be discussed, but 
of ecclesiastical principalities, about which the 
greatest difficulty is to get into possession, because 
they are gained either by fortune or virtue, but 
kept without either, being supported by ancient 
statutes universally received in the Christian 
Church, which are of such power and authority 
they do keep this prince in his dignity, let his con- 
versation or conduct be what it will. These are the 
only persons who have lands and do not defend 
them ; subjects and do not govern them ; and yet 
their lands are not taken from them, though they 
never defend them ; nor their subjects dissatisfied, 
though they never regard them ; so that these prin- 
cipalities are the happiest and most secure in the 
world, by being managed by a supernatural power, 
above the wisdom and contrivance of man." 



The Renaissance, 71 

At the threshold of the modern age, as at the 
beginning of the ancient world, we find Our ances- 
tors eating, somewhat willfully and intemperately, 
of the fruit of the tree of knowledge — in neither 
case with wholly satisfactory consequences. The 
watchword of the eager students of the period 
was " Litterae Humaniores " ; but the general 
outcome of the movement, in society, Church, 
and State, was that men were not so much human- 
ized as brutalized. The cult of wisdom and 
beauty produced a specious strength and a super- 
ficial refinement, but rotten at the heart, as Taine 
says. 1 The revival of heathenism culminated in 
the papacy of Alexander VI — the seating of 
Antichrist in the most holy place. 

There did not lack a prophet, however, to 
rebuke the idolatry of the people and foretell the 
divine judgments upon Antichrist and his serv- 
ants. Girolamo Savonarola was of noble family, 
his father being court physician in the opulent 
and splendid city of Ferrara. From boyhood his 
ideal was the devout and holy life of the best 
medieval Christianity, his favorite authors being 
Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. The classical 
learning of his day took little hold upon him, for 

1 " They tore one another to pieces like beautiful lions and superb 
panthers." — Taine's English Lit., p. 355. 



72 Modern Religious Thought. 

he saw the liberty of the Renaissance give birth 
to the license of every evil passion, and a state of 
public and private life which moved his intensely 
moral nature with disgust and horror. At the 
age of twenty-three he left his home and entered 
the order of St. Dominic, greatly to the disap- 
pointment of his parents, who had planned for 
him a brilliant career at the court of Este. " The 
motives by which I have been led to enter into a 
religious life are these : the great misery of the 
world; the iniquities of men — their rapes, adul- 
teries, robberies ; their pride, idolatry, and fearful 
blasphemies ; so that things have come to such a 
pass that no one can be found acting righteously. 
I could not endure the enormous wickedness of 
the blinded people of Italy ; and the more so be- 
cause I saw everywhere virtue despised and vice 
honored." 1 But the youthful enthusiast found 
small comfort in the churchly institutions of the 
day, and soon in a poem on " The Ruin of the 
Church," we hear him sigh : a Where are the doc- 
tors of old times, the saints, the learning, charity, 
chastity of the past? Who has wrought this 
wrong ? ' And the answer is : " The proud 
mother, Rome." Preaching later at Florence, in 

1 Letter to his father. 



The Renaisscwice. 73 

the city where Lorenzo the Magnificent was at the 
height of his power and the philosophic sensualism 
of the Medici was the universal ideal, he had the 
courage to declare that the philosophers were in 
hell, and that an old woman knew more of saving- 
faith than Plato. 1 On his first visit to Florence 
he failed to attract any public attention ; but 
later, when the burden of his prophecy had taken 
definite form and his wonderful powers of oratory 
had developed, his success was instantaneous, 
phenomenal, and to the day of his death his 
supremacy was unchallenged by any rival. His 
message was : " The Church will be scourged, then 
regenerated, and this quickly ; " and the message 
was delivered with the boldness, the earnestness, 
the melting tenderness, and the terrific invective 
of a Hebrew prophet. The scandalous state of 
the Church was as clearly pictured as the corrup- 
tion of common life, and when Alexander VI 
placed the ban of excommunication upon the city 
of Florence, Savonarola replied by denouncing the 
Pope as Antichrist and demanding that a general 
council be convened to depose the false pope from 
the holy seat of St. Peter. During Savonarola's 
supremacy in Florence, Christ was declared to be 

1 Symonds, Age of the Despots, p. 461. 



74 Modem Religious Thought. 

the head of the state ; heathen pageantry and 
bacchanalian songs gave place to devout hymns 
and religious processions ; obscene pictures and 
manuscripts of Boccaccio and the classic poets 
were given to the flames. The reform, however, 
was too sudden and violent to be permanent, and 
soon the party of the old order raised its head 
and Savonarola was executed by cord and fagot 
before the Palazzo Pubblico. His appearance at 
this juncture at the center of the humanistic 
movement is significant as the protest of genuine 
Christianity against the paganizing excesses of 
the Renaissance, and is a prophecy of the coming 
Reformation. Luther was a boy of fifteen years 
at the death of Savonarola. Nineteen years later 
the theses were nailed to the door of the Witten- 
berg church, the storm burst out of the north, and 
the Church was " scourged, then regenerated ; and 
this quickly," as compared with the slow progress 
of most world movements in the long life of 
humanity. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE REFORMATION. 

T T is common to class the German Reformation 
-*- as one of the beneficent results of the general 
Renaissance movement — the protest of the Zeit- 
geist against the intellectual and spiritual tyranny 
of Rome. This is in a sense true, for the intel- 
lectual light which made it possible and guided 
its course came from the revival of ancient learn- 
ing; and when Luther's word of protest was once 
spoken all the dim strivings of the age after a 
broader and richer life ranged themselves on the 
side of the reformer. Yet the word itself was 
primarily moral rather than intellectual — in tem- 
per and purpose Luther was more nearly akin to 
Savonarola than to Erasmus. That indulgences 
should be openly hawked through the cities of 
Germany and sold for money was a shameless 
desecration of the spiritual treasures of the 
Church ; it was making the temple of God a 
house of merchandise and a den of thieves. 
Luther did not at that time entertain a doubt that 

75 



76 Modern Religious Thought, 

the Church of Rome held the keys of heaven and 
hell. His outraged moral sense and religious feel- 
ing declares against a perversiou of Christian 
doctrine, and he is sure that Pope Leo would 
rather see St. Peter's reduced to ashes than com- 
pleted by money flowing from such scandalous 
abuses. Leo X was an easy-going sensualist, of 
genial temper and a certain degree of refinement. 
Tried by the standards of his age he was an 
amiable and worthy gentleman, and would be so 
known in history had not his high office brought 
him into sharp and almost ludicrous contrast 
with the Christian ideal. He regarded the oppor- 
tunities of life as invitations to use and enjoyment. 
If he needed money to complete St. Peter's, and 
he always needed money for that or something 
else, why should he not avail himself of the super- 
stition of the northern barbarians ? A large 
revenue was one of the accessories of the papacy 
which he was ready to enjoy with decorous grati- 
tude to God. He could never understand Luther's 
position, and died in the belief that Luther was 
moved by jealousy because a rival monastic order 
gained the commissions from the sale of indul- 
gences. Luther was surprised and shocked to 
find the Church defending such abuses, and so the 



The Reformation, 77 

struggle grew till Luther's conception of the errors 
and corruptions of Rome drove him farther and 
farther in opposition to the hierarchy ; but origi- 
nally the Reformation was moral and practical 
rather than doctrinal and theoretical. As Augus- 
tine resisted the previous tendency and purified 
Christian thought against the adverse influence 
of Greek philosophy, so Luther resisted the ten- 
dency of his time and purified the Christian life, 
endangered by the revival of Greek ethics. The 
Reformation, viewed from the developed stand- 
point of our day, was the first battle of purified 
Christianity with the essentially Greek spirit 
which is the controlling influence in modern 
philosophy, science, and culture. In this struggle 
Christianity came to understand the enemy which 
must be conquered or somehow reconciled to 
itself — the religious problem of the modern 
Church. 

" The Reformers themselves considered that 
their work arrested the progress of unbelief and 
saved the religion of Europe. Luther says that 
such were the ecclesiastical abuses in Germany 
that frightful disorders would have inevitably 
arisen, that all religion would have perished, and 
Christians have become Epicureans. The infi- 



78 Modern Religious Thought, 

delity that had taken root and sprung up in the 
strongholds of the Church in connection with the 
revival of classical learning threatened to spread 
over Europe." 1 There were errors and abuses 
in doctrine, extreme emphasis of churchly power, 
sacraments, etc. ; yet it was more a perversion 
from circumstance and practice than of essential 
doctrine. When the Roman doctrine came to 
deliberate and clear expression in the decisions of 
the Council of Trent there was little divergence 
on fundamental principles from the position of 
the Reformers. The doctrine of justification by 
faith is stated nearly in the sense of Augustine, 
though it takes on a semi-Pelagian color from the 
purpose to oppose the Protestant denial of human 
freedom and cooperation. The Augsburg Confes- 
sion says : " They [the Catholic clergy] now 
begin to make mention of faith, concerning which 
there was formerly a deep silence ; they teach that 
we are not justified by works alone." 2 

And yet to say that the purpose of Luther was 
essentially moral rather than doctrinal, " to say that 
the Reformation began in a protest against abuses 
of administration, is simply to say that Protestant- 
ism was not full grown at the start. In its mature 

1 Fisher, Reformation, p. 9. 2 Article XX. 



The Reformation. 79 

form, as all the world knows, it was a rejection of 
papal and priestly authority." 1 The Reformation, 
in its widest aspect and significance, was the 
revolt of the expanding powers of modern culture 
against the ascetic ideal of medieval Christianity, 
and the authority of the Church to impose that 
ideal upon men spiritually free — the ascetic ideal 
which the Roman Church defended against the 
Reformers, and which that Church still represents. 
" If any one saith that the marriage state is to be 
placed above the state of virginity or of celibacy 
and that it is not better and more blessed to 
remain in virginity or in celibacy than to be 
united in matrimony ; let him be anathema." 2 
It was impossible that this ascetic ideal should 
maintain itself except in the twilight of semi- 
barbarism, and the awakening life not only of 
Italy but of Europe in general was ready to reject 
it. In the broad stream of the Renaissance devel- 
opment, however, upon whose bosom our whole 
modern age is drifting, there is room for many 
eddies and counter-currents, and for local move- 
ments, some swift, some sluggish. In Italy the 
humanist movement was rapid and impetuous, 
and soon its immoral extremes and its glaring 

1 Fisher, p. 13. 2 Council of Trent, " On Matrimony," Canon X. 



80 Modern Religious Thought. 

contrast with the traditional faith were met by 
the counter-current of the Reformation. The 
Roman Church reformed external abuses, and 
rebuked the excesses of Renaissance culture and 
art, 1 yet in general remained true to the medieval 
type. Protestantism gave men liberty, in the 
expectation that they would freely choose the 
Christian law — undertook the difficult task of 
reconciling the right of individual judgment with 
the existence of a spiritual truth which is one, 
immutable, and universally necessary for human 
salvation. And yet all about and beneath these 
conflicting currents of effort and opinion was and 
is the main stream of the Renaissance develop- 
ment, giving form and reality to the central prob- 
lem of our modern world — How reconcile the 
glorified heaven of the Christian and the glorified 
earth of the Greek? Much that is best in the 
non-Christian thought in our day aims to make 
our common life rich and satisfying by finding the 
life of God in the miracles and revelations of 
daily experience ; but it has no region of infinite 
attainment and eternal peace, beyond the inevi- 

1 " In the invocation of saints, the veneration of relics, and the sacred 
use of images every superstition should be removed, all filthy lucre be 
abolished ; finally all lasciviousness be avoided, in such wise that figures 
shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust." 
(Council of Trent, On Sacred Images.) 



The Reformation. 81 

table limitation and tragedy of the present state. 
In the solution and synthesis of these problems 
— the life of God on earth and the life of man in 
heaven — we may hope for the full-orbed truth 
of the future. 

It is now apparent why the Reformation period 
developed no essentially new t}^pe of theology. 
The original difference was one of aspect and 
practice rather than of fundamental doctrine, and 
each party sought a tower of defense in the great 
name and authority of Augustine. We have seen 
that Augustine taught that a man can be justified 
only by faith, but saving faith is that on the 
ground of which he is received into the Catholic 
Church ; and the criteria of Christian truth are 
the Scriptures and the Church, — it being assumed 
that their utterances are harmonious, and no rule 
for action being given in case of a conflict. Just 
this contingency had now arisen, and the result 
was the natural one — each party quoted Augus- 
tine, emphasizing according to personal interest. 
This difference in purpose and emphasis, however, 
produced characteristic methods of dealing with 
the doctrinal matter. Catholic theology becomes 
semi-Pelagian in defending human works and 
merit as elements of iustification, while in its 



82 Modern Religious Thought. 

emphasis of an absolutely free grace Protestant- 
ism goes beyond Augustine in asserting the 
natural bondage and sinfulness of men ; and the 
Protestant method is affected by exalting the 
Scriptures as the one pure source of Christian 
truth. Here are the storm centers of the general 
controversies of the succeeding period — justifica- 
tion by faith alone, and the unique character and 
authority of the Scriptures. Within the Protes- 
tant body Luther's intolerance concerning the 
Eucharist gave rise to violent discussions, and pre- 
vented the union of the Lutheran and Reformed 
churches ; and the Calvinistic extremes in refer- 
ence to the divine sovereignty and human deprav- 
ity culminate at last in the Arminian reaction. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMERS. 

A LTHOUGH it has been necessary to go far 
-*--^ back into history and study the preceding 
movement of theological thought, our study of 
German Theology proper begins at that point 
where the theological science takes on a local 
and national character — where the all-embracing 
Roman communion breaks up into a Latin, a 
German, and an English church. 

The history of every important movement in 
human thought, as is true of the history of our 
race in general, begins with an heroic age. 
Though the existing condition of things may have 
become intolerable, though the mind of the whole 
people may be vaguely longing for and groping 
after a truer and better way, yet it is not till some 
hero of faith and courage appears that this latent 
feeling is quickened and concentrated into a 
thunderbolt of indignant protest. 

Among the great personalities who appear dur- 
ing the stirring scenes of the Reformation, the 

83 



84 Modem Religious Thought, 

most important for our purpose is Martin Luther. 
This is true not alone because he possessed the 
courage first to throw down the gauge of battle 
before the apparently resistless power of Rome, 
but because his vigorous intellect, his simple and 
earnest piety, his tremendous force of character, 
find expression on every page of Reformation his- 
tory, and are even yet living influences in the 
Protestant world. And this is true not only of 
the strength but of the weakness of Luther, not 
only of the truth but of the error which he held 
— each is magnified by the greatness of the man 
to a larger result of present and future good or 
evil. 

It is also suggestive to observe that Luther's 
imperfections ally him to the common thought of 
his time, and fit him to be the mouthpiece of the 
German people. Had he been as scholarly and 
reserved as Melanchthon, as clear in intellect, well- 
balanced in judgment, and as thorough-going in 
abolishing papal forms and civil abuses as Zwingli, 
the German people would not have found him the 
man after their own hearts. It was the son of 
the miner who had become the professor of phil- 
osophy ; who read and lectured on Aristotle, and 
who yet held verbal discussions with Satan and 



The Theology of the Reformers. 85 

who knew persons that were possessed by the 
devil ; who reached the mysticism of the age by a 
faith based not on the externals of Church decrees 
or scholastic learning, but on a simple and imme- 
diate acceptance of the Saviour ; who reached the 
practical man of affairs by exposing the corrup- 
tions and freeing him from the pecuniar}^ exac- 
tions of the hierarchy ; who in his zeal for reform 
was yet true to the sober conservatism of the 
German people in retaining what was edifying in 
the Roman ceremonial and doctrine, and would 
not separate Church and State ; whose style, oral 
or written, — simple direct language, fertile but 
unregulated fancy, dealing only with superlatives, 
overwhelming his opponents with an impetuous 
stream of argument or invective, always plain and 
blunt, often coarse and rude, — was so exact an 
expression of his sincere and earnest but unsym- 
metrical personality and appealed so strongly to a 
people not very enlightened or refined ; here was 
the man who was sent to utter the word which 
was to be heard and obeyed by an age in which 
great and prophetic thoughts were struggling to 
free themselves from the fetters of traditional 
error and superstition. 

We find in the nature and circumstances of the 



86 Modern Religious Thought. 

religious controversies of Luther's time prophe- 
cies of the acrid and profitless discussions and 
the dry scholasticism of the succeeding period. 
These controversies were heated and bitter, as is 
natural in an age when an opinion was no trifle, 
but might easily lead to the scaffold or the stake, 
and when men thoroughly believed there was one 
truth and they could find it in the infallible guide, 
the Scriptures. This tendency in theological dis- 
cussion was unfortunately intensified by Luther's 
example. By native disposition he saw clearly 
and felt strongly, and expressed his opinions with 
vigor and often with violence. This natural bent 
was strengthened in his early battles against 
Rome, where he was thoroughly convinced he 
contended against the visible kingdom of Satan. 
When he was successful in the discussion he gave 
God the praise ; those who refused to be con- 
vinced were the children of the devil, and the 
rage of his opponents gave him satisfaction as 
showing how sorely their master had been 
wounded. This spirit of uncompromising hostil- 
ity to all error may have been beneficial as fur- 
nishing a sharp blade with which to cut clear from 
the corruptions of the papacy ; but there can be 
no question of its injurious effects when carried 



The Theology of the Reformers. 87 

over into discussions with fellow Protestants or 
those friendly to the cause of reform. Erasmus 
is an atheist and Epicurean, because he holds to 
the freedom of the human will ; Carlsbad, (Eco- 
lampadius, Zwingli, are given over to the devil 
because they do not agree with Luther as to the 
Eucharist. Here we find the fruitful seeds of 
discord sown among the Protestant churches, 
which divided them when they should have stood 
most united against the attacks of reformed 
Catholicism, and have brought scandal upon the 
name of Protestantism and the general cause of 
Christ by the multiplication of contending sects. 
That loyalty to truth which stood grandly forth 
without fear of the lightnings of the Vatican, 
and has fixed upon itself the admiring eyes of all 
coming ages, when directed to the unessential 
differences of the Protestant believers, degen- 
erates into obstinacy and intolerance, rends 
asunder the body of Christ, and sends down 
through the future a melancholy train of evil 
consequences — dissensions, bloodshed, and war. 
The early, classical expression of the Lutheran 
doctrine is the Augsburg Confession (1530). It 
was written by Melanchthon with the revision and 
approval of Luther. The Preface, addressed to 



88 Modern Religious Thought, 

the emperor, Charles V, states with simplicity and 
dignity the willingness of the reform party to 
discuss the existing differences, that they may be 
"settled in friendship and love." Then follows in 
Part I a statement of the chief articles of faith. 
These articles are thoroughly Augustinian, Au- 
gustine being frequently quoted. This appears 
markedly in the articles on Free Will and The 
Cause of Sin (XVIII and XIX). The former 
contains a long quotation from the Hyper- 
gnosticon, and the cause of sin is said to be 
" the will of the wicked, which will God not aid- 
ing, turneth itself from God." There appear of 
course some new elements of emphasis or expres- 
sion in the discussion of Justification, the Church, 
the Ministry, the Sacraments, Good Works, etc. 
Part I concludes : " This is about the sum of the 
doctrine among us, in which can be seen that 
there is nothing which is discrepant with the 
Scriptures, or with the Catholic Church, or even 
with the Roman Church, so far as that Church is 
known from the writings of the fathers. This 
being the case, they judge us harshly who insist 
that we shall be regarded as heretics. But the 
dissension is concerning certain traditions and 
abuses, which without any certain authority have 



The Theology of the Reformers. 89 

crept into the churches ; in which things it would 
be a becoming lenity on the part of the bishops 
that they should bear with us, since even the 
Canons are not so severe as to demand the same 
rights everywhere." 

These abuses are enumerated and discussed in 
Part II in the Confession. These are " of both 
kinds " (in the Lord's Supper), of the Marriage 
of Priests, Mass, Confession, Distinction of Meats 
and of Traditions, Monastic Vows, and of Eccle- 
siastical Power. The free spirit of the Renais- 
sance appears characteristically in the article on 
Monastic Vows: — "The commandments of God 
and the true worship of God are obscured when 
men hear that monks alone are in that state of per- 
fection ; because that Christian perfection is this 
— to fear God sincerely, to conceive great faith, 
to ask and certainly to look for help from God in 
all our affairs according to our calling. In these 
things doth true perfection and true worship of 
God consist ; it doth not consist in singleness of 
life, in beggary, or in vile apparel. The people 
doth also conceive many pernicious opinions from 
these false commendations of the monastic life. 
They hear celibacy praised above measure ; there- 
fore with offense of conscience they live in 



90 Modern Religious Thought. 

marriage. They hear that mendicants alone are 
perfect ; therefore with offense of conscience they 
keep their possessions, and buy and sell. Others 
do think that all magistracy and civil offices are 
unworthy Christian men. We read examples of 
men who, forsaking wedlock and leaving the 
government of the commonwealth, have hid them- 
selves in monasteries. This they call flying out 
of the world and seeking a kind of life which is 
more acceptable to God ; neither do they see that 
God is to be served in those commandments which 
he himself hath delivered, not in the command- 
ments which are devised by men." 

Three types of opinion in respect to the Lord'b 
Supper were developed among the Protestant 
churches; that of Luther, that Christ was cor- 
porally present in the elements ; that of Zwingli, 
that the feast was essentially mnemonic ; and 
that of Calvin, that Christ is spiritually present. 
SchafT thus compares the Lutheran and Calvin- 
istic views and contrasts them with that of the 
Roman Church : " Lutheranism seeks the super- 
natural in the natural, Calvinism above the natu- 
ral, Romanism without the natural." 1 Luther's 

1 Creeds, I, p. 217. 



The Theology of the Reformers, 91 

natural conservatism impelled him to retain all 
Catholic doctrines and usages which were not 
distinctly antagonistic to Protestant principles, 
and this tendency in him was early intensified by 
the excesses of Protestant fanatics. His religious 
feeling was concerned in asserting that Christ was 
really present in the sacrament, and he found in 
the writings of his "dear master" among the 
schoolmen, William of Occam, a theory of Christ's 
presence in the elements which seemed to accord 
with justification by faith and with the priest- 
hood of all believers. The glorified body of 
Christ, being omnipresent, must be able to inter- 
penetrate other bodies, occupy the same space as 
material substances, otherwise it could not be 
ubiquitous. Therefore the body and blood of 
Christ are present in the elements naturally and 
necessarily, and not by the magical operation of 
the priest. Luther, however, does not rest upon 
the philosophical argument, but confessedly only 
on the words of Christ spoken to the disciples at 
the Last Supper, "This is my body." At the 
conference at Marburg, where he was brought to 
meet Zwingli, he wrote these words on the table 
before him, and refused to move from their literal 
sense. What he considered Zwingli's rationalism 



92 Modern Religious Thought. 

was so offensive to him that he refused Zwingli's 
hand at parting — an intolerance prophetic of the 
divisions of later Protestantism. 1 

In his view of the Eucharist, Luther advocates 
a doctrine so difficult to distinguish from the 
Catholic teaching as to be a manifest weakness in 
his controversy with Rome. He says repeatedly 
he would have liked to abandon the doctrine of 
the real presence, but the Scripture was too strong 
for him. In his extreme assertion, however, of 
the bondage of the natural will, he is clearly 
influenced by antagonism to the Romish doctrine 
of works. His controversy with Erasmus on the 
will is a repetition of the arguments of Augustine 
and the Pelagians, though Erasmus plainly has 
the advantage. He arouses Luther's indignation 
by asserting that the whole question of the rela- 
tion of the human to the divine action in conver- 
sion is unimportant, is not made clear in the 
Scriptures, and should be preached with caution 
as liable to misunderstanding and abuse. The 
paradoxes of Scripture and experience on the 
point are clearly stated or adroitly suggested. 
The blunt honesty of Luther drives him into a 

1 " Luther," Encyclopedia Britannica, XV, p. 81. Article on " Occam 
and Luther," Theol. Studien for 1839, 1. 



The Theology of the Reformers. 93 

position alike repugnant to reason and morality. 
Erasmus must be an atheist or an Epicurean to 
assert that the doctrine of the will is unimportant, 
for it is vitally essential to justification by faith; 
and the bondage of the will is clearly taught in 
the Scriptures — a point which he finds some diffi- 
culty in making good. 

"'Who (you say) will endeavor to amend his 
life ? ? I answer no man ! No man can ! For 
your self-amenders without the Spirit, God regard- 
eth not, for they are hypocrites. But the elect 
will be amended by the Holy Spirit ; the rest will 
perish unamended. i Who will believe (you say) 
that he is loved of God ? ' I answer no man will 
believe it ! No man can. But the elect will be- 
lieve it. And as to your saying, ' By these doc- 
trines the flood-gate of iniquity is thrown open 
unto men ' — be it so. Nevertheless, by the same 
doctrines, there is thrown open to the elect a gate 
unto righteousness — a way unto God ! " x 

He gives two reasons for preaching the bondage 
of the will : " First, God has promised his grace to 
the humbled; but a man cannot be thoroughly 
humbled until he comes to know that his salvation 



1 Luther's " Bondage of the Will," translated by Rev. Henry Cole, 
London, 1823, p. 55. 



94 Modern Religious Thought. 

is utterly beyond his own powers, counsel, en- 
deavors, will, and works, and absolutely depend- 
ing on the will, counsel, pleasure, and work of 
another, that is, of God only. . . . The other 
reason is : that faith is in things not seen. There- 
fore, that there might be room for faith, it is 
necessary that all those things which are believed 
should be hidden. But they are not hidden more 
deeply than under the contrary of sight, sense, 
and experience. . . . Thus He conceals his eternal 
mercy and lovingkindness behind his eternal 
wrath ; his righteousness behind apparent iniquity. 
This is the highest degree of faith — to believe 
that he is merciful who saves so few and damns so 
many ; to believe him just who, according to his 
own will, makes us necessarily damnable, that he 
might seem, as Erasmus says, ' To delight in the 
torments of the miserable, and to be an object of 
hatred rather than of love.' If, therefore, I could 
by any means comprehend how that same God 
can be merciful and just who carries the appear- 
ance of so much wrath and iniquity, there would 
be no need of faith." 

Luther's explanation of the hardening of Pha- 
raoh is practically that of Augustine. He rejects 
the suggestion of Erasmus that the prescience of 



The Theology of the Reformers. 95 

God does not impose necessity. "If God fore- 
knew that Judas would be a traitor, Judas became 
a traitor of necessity ; nor was it in the power of 
Judas or of any other creature to change that 
will ; though he did what he did willingly, not by 
compulsion ; for that willing of his was his own 
work ; which God, by the motion of his omnipo- 
tence, moved on into action as he does anything 
else." 1 In endeavoring to account for the fall of 
Adam and sin in general, Luther takes a position 
which is thoroughly consistent and impregnable 
so long as one has the courage to defy the natural 
feeling and common sense of humanity. " God is 
that being for whose will no cause or reason is to 
be assigned as a rule or standard by which it acts ; 
seeing that nothing is superior or equal to it, but 
it is itself the rule of all things. Wherefore, 
what God wills is not therefore right, because he 
ought or ever was bound so to will ; but, on the 
contrary, what takes place is therefore right, be- 
cause he so wills." 2 

Luther frequently asserts that the arguments of 
Erasmus are utterly trivial and worthless, and he 
always maintained that he had completely refuted 
his sophistries ; yet he was secretly conscious that 

i Bondage of the Will, p. 220. 2 Ibid. p. 215. 



96 Modem Religious Thought. 

the general verdict was against him, and he never 
forgave Erasmus for the humiliation of his defeat. 
It was intolerable that the idol of his heart, justi- 
fication by faith alone, should be made ridiculous 
before the world, as either incomprehensible or 
immoral. " In one of his sermons he says : 4 1 
pray all of you who have seriously at heart the 
honor of Christ and the gospel, to be the enemies 
of Erasmus.' One day Dr. Luther exclaimed to 
Drs. Jonas and Pomeranus : ' My dying prayers to 
you would be, Scourge this serpent.' Looking 
one day at a portrait of Erasmus, Luther said : 
4 Erasmus, as his countenance proves, is a crafty, 
designing man who has laughed at God and 
religion.' " 1 

It has been remarked that Luther's conservative 
temper led him to aim at preserving a certain 
union between Church and State, in contrast to 
the Reformed churches which have proved more 
favorable to the cause of popular freedom by 
inculcating the independence of the Church from 
the civil authorities. At the peace of Augsburg 
it was left with the civil authorities of each prin- 
cipality or imperial city to determine whether the 



1 Life of Luther, Michelet, p. 129. See article on " Erasmus and 
Luther," Zeitschrift fur Hist. TheoL, 1845. 



The Theology of the Reformers. 97 

Roman or the Lutheran system should be adopted. 
The Church was still further brought under con- 
trol of the State by the consistorial system, which 
was adopted in most Lutheran communities. The 
episcopal authority of the Roman bishops was 
simply transferred to a consistory, the members 
of which were appointed by the prince. 1 As 
must always be true in placing religion under 
State control, while this system gave the Protes- 
tant churches an apparent strength they were really 
weakened by the alliance. Instead of using this 
ecclesiastical power to guard the purity and 
advance the spiritual interests of the churches, it 
was too often perverted to the service of ambi- 
tion, and the doubtful morals of these defenders 
of the faith brought scandal on the cause of 
religion. An illustration of this is found in the 
case of Philip, landgrave of Hesse, who was one 
of the boldest and most active members of the 
Reform party. He requests the theologians of 
Wittenberg for permission to take a second wife. 
He says that his " wife is neither good-looking 
nor good-tempered " ; that he has lived in immoral 
relations ever since his marriage ; " and as I won't 
give up this way of living, I cannot present 

*° Lutherans," Enc. Brit. XV, p. 85. 



98 Modem Religious Thought. 

myself at the holy table. . . . Were I to take up 
arms for the gospel's sake, I could only do so 
with a troubled conscience, for I should say to 
myself, 'If you die in this war, you go to the 
devil.' I have read the Old and the New Testa- 
ments carefully, and find no other help indicated 
than to take a second wife ; and I ask before God, 
why cannot I do what Abraham, Jacob, David, 
Lamech, and Solomon have done ? " The Luth- 
eran theologians were placed in a delicate position. 
They could not condemn the Old Testament 
without bringing into disrepute the Protestant 
standard of doctrine and practice. Philip was 
allowed a double marriage, but with the recom- 
mendation that the second should be secret. 

" Your highness must be aware of the difference 
between establishing an universal and granting an 
exceptional law. . . . We cannot publicly sanc- 
tion a plurality of wives. ... If, nevertheless, your 
highness is fully resolved to take a second wife, we 
are of opinion that the marriage should be secret. 

" Given at Wittenberg after the festival of St. 
Nicholas, 1539." 

(Signed) Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, 
Bucer, etc. 1 

1 Life of Luther, Michelet, p. 170. 



The Theology of the Reformers. 99 

This occurrence, with others indicative of a 
growing laxity of morals among the Protestants, 
embittered the closing years of Luther's life. 
And all through the subsequent centuries State 
control of the German churches has borne evil 
fruit, having been unfavorable to purity of doc- 
trine as well as of morals. The resulting doc- 
trinal freedom may have encouraged original 
investigation, but it has produced a situation so in- 
comprehensible to the American mind — professors 
of theology in orthodox German universities 
seemingly as far from orthodoxy in belief and 
perhaps in practice as our notorious Colonel 
Robert Ingersoll. 

Our sketch of the religious development of the 
Reformation period would be incomplete without 
a brief reference to the two other prominent 
figures of the time — Zwingli and Calvin. Of all 
the Reformers, Zwingli is most in accord with the 
enlightened and humane opinions of the modern 
world. His early life was sunny and joyous. As a 
student he acquired a love for classical learning, 
and he was fortunate in having as his teacher in 
theology the celebrated Thomas Wythenbach of 
Basel, a man of scholarly and liberal views. 
Zwingli's religious nature was less profound and 



100 Modern Religious Thought. 

intense than that of Luther, but also less gloomy 
and morbid, and his serene and symmetrical char- 
acter is a pleasing object for contemplation in that 
age when moral earnestness was so prone to run 
out into fanatical extremes. He was Augustinian 
in his views of sin and grace, and thoroughly 
loyal to the main principles of the Reformation ; 
but the rigor of his dogmas was tempered by a 
genial humanity and a love for classical antiquity. 
He gave great offense to the orthodoxy of his day 
by asserting that all infants are saved through the 
sacrifice of Christ, and even that the best of the 
heathen philosophers and sages are in heaven, 
because the Spirit has been in the hearts of all 
good men of every age and nation. 

The theologian, par excellence, of the Reforma- 
tion is John Calvin. His comprehensive and 
penetrating intellect gave to Protestantism that 
compact and systematic form which was to carry 
it through the terrific conflicts and bloody perse- 
cutions of the succeeding period. The theological 
work of first importance in Protestant literature 
is Calvin's "Institutes of Theology." His name 
has displaced that of Augustine as the represen- 
tative of that type of theology which emphasized 
the sovereignty of God and human depravity. 



The Theology of the Reformers. 101 

It has been already remarked that Calvin goes 
beyond Augustine in asserting that Adam's fall 
is the object of a divine decree. Yet he still 
holds, on grounds certainly mysterious to human 
reason, that Adam and all men are guilty and 
responsible. He explicitly rejects what later be- 
came the common so-called Calvinistic view — 
that God permits the destruction of the impious, 
but does not will it. " What reason shall we 
assign for his permitting it, but because it is his 
will ? . . . Besides, their perdition depends upon 
the divine predestination in such a manner that 
the cause and matter of it are found in them- 
selves. For the first man fell because the Lord 
had determined it was so expedient. The reason 
of this determination is unknown to us. Yet it 
is certain that he determined thus only because 
he foresaw it would tend to the just illustration 
of the glory of his name. Whenever you hear 
the glory of God mentioned, think of his justice. 
For what deserves praise must be just. Man 
falls, therefore, according to the appointment of 
Divine Providence ; but he falls by his own 
fault." 1 We find here again that fundamental 
principle of the Reformation theology to which 

i Inst. Ill, 23, 8. 



102 Modem Religious Thought. 

Luther appeals against Erasmus. "The will of 
God is the highest rule of justice ; so that what 
he wills must be considered just, for this very 
reason, because he wills it." x 

» Inst. Ill, 23, a. 



CHAPTER VII. 

POST-REFORMATION MOVEMENTS. 

rj^HESE extreme views in reference to predes- 
"^ tination always encountered opposition in the 
Protestant churches, and it was found difficult to 
maintain them with rigorous consistency. In 
Melanchthon's later years he held that the human 
will cooperates in conversion — " synergism " — 
and also adopted Calvin's view of the Lord's 
Supper. These opinions were extremely offensive 
to the strict Lutherans, and the followers of Me- 
lanchthon came to be known as Crypto-Calvinists 
— Calvinism being regarded as a compound of 
heresy, rationalism, and hypocrisy. The Lutheran 
" Formula of Concord," which is directed espe- 
cially against the heresies of Melanchthon's party, 
endeavors to reconcile the differences of the pre- 
destinarians and the synergists, and ends by con- 
demning both doctrines, without replacing them 
by any comprehensible statement. " We there- 
fore reject all the errors which we will now enu- 
merate. ... II. That when God calls us to him, he 

103 



104 Modern Religious Thought. 

does not earnestly wish that all men should come 
to him. III. That God is not willing that all men 
should be saved, but that some men are destined 
to destruction, not on account of their sins, but 
by the mere counsel, purpose, and will of God, so 
that they cannot in any wise attain to salvation. 
IV. That the mercy of God is not the sole cause 
of the divine election, but that there is also some 
cause in us, on account of which cause God has 
chosen us to eternal life. All these dogmas are 
false, horrid, and blasphemous." 1 

" Supralapsarianism, which makes unf alien 
man, or man before his creation (that is, a non 
ens, a mere abstraction of thought), the object of 
God's double foreordination for the manifestation 
of his mercy in the elect and his justice in the 
reprobate, was ably advocated by Beza in Geneva, 
Gomarus in Holland, Twisse (the Prolocutor of 
the Westminster Assembly) in England, Nathan- 
iel Emmons (1745-1840) in New England ; but it 
never received symbolical authority, and was 
virtually or expressly excluded by the Synod of 
Dort, the Westminster Assembly, and even the 
Formula Consensus Helvetica. All Calvinistic 
Confessions, without exception, trace the fall to 

1 Article XI, negative. 



Post-Reformation Movements. 105 

a permissive decree, make man responsible and 
justly punishable for sin, and reject as a blasphe- 
mous slander the charge that God is the author 
of sin. And this is the case with all the Calvinis- 
tic divines of the present day." 1 

We may close this period of our discussion by 
brief references to the doctrine of inspiration and 
to the Arminian controversy. In relation to both 
questions, orthodoxy won victories more costly 
than defeat, and assumed positions so extreme as 
to foretell an inevitable reaction. 

In the attempt to make out the unique infalli- 
bility of the Scriptures, the inspiration doctrine 
was at length pushed to such extremes as to fall 
by its own weight. This appeared especially in 
the controversy concerning the Hebrew vowel 
points. It was the common Protestant view that 
infallibility was to be asserted of the original 
Hebrew manuscripts ; but the Roman theolo- 
gians claimed, on the contrary, that the Maso- 
retic text had been corrupted and misplaced by 
the Jews, and that the Vulgate, having origi- 
nated before these changes, really afforded the 
older and correcter text. The Protestants were 

1 Schaff, Creeds, vol. i, p. 454. 



106 Modern Religious Thought. 

still further disturbed by the claim that the 
Hebrew vowels of the present text belonged to a 
time much later than that of the original authors — 
a view set forth by a German Jew, Elias Levita 
(1538), and Louis Cappel (1622). 1 Though 
Cappel could appeal in support of his view to 
Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, and was followed to 
a great extent by the learned, yet he was popu- 
larly regarded as a man dangerous to the Protes- 
tant interest. 

The Formula Consensus Helvetica (1675) 
explicitly condemns his view, declaring that the 
consonants and vowel points of the Bible are alike 
theopneustic. " In specie autem Hebraicus V. T. 
codex, quem ex traditione ecclesiae Judaicae, cui 
olim oracula Dei commissa sunt, accepimus 
hodieque retinemus, turn quoad consonas, turn 
quoad vocalia, sive puncta ipsa, sive punctorum 
saltern potestatem, et turn quoad res, turn quoad 
verba i?etf7rveo<rro?, ut fidei et vitae nostrae, una 
cum codice Novi T. sit Canon unicus et illibatus, 
ad cujus normam, ceu Lydium lapidem, universae 
quae extant Versiones, sive orientales sive occi- 
dentales exigendae, et sicubi deflectunt revocandea 
sunt." 2 

1 Ladcl, Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, vol. ii, p. 186. 
2 Herzog, Real Ency., Art., " Buxtorf," vol. iii, p. 50. 



Post- Reformation Movements. 107 

Arminius was a devout and scholarly man, of 
mild and candid temper, who was led to modify 
his views of the Calvinistic doctrines by studies 
originally undertaken for the purpose of defend- 
ing them. The theological controversy was unfor- 
tunately complicated by political differences, so 
that, although the Synod of Dort was eminent for 
the learning and piety represented, the decision 
cannot be considered an impartial judgment of 
the doctrinal questions involved. The Arminian 
party represented not only less rigid theological 
opinions, but tolerance of religious differences, 
and a more democratic type of government. 

Prince Maurice of the House of Orange, who 
was the popular hero because of his successes in 
the wars against Spain, used the controversy to 
concentrate power in his own hands by destroying 
the aristocracy. The liberal opinions had been 
largely received by the upper classes, while the 
common people and the great majority of the 
clergy were rigidly Calvinistic. 

The Synod (1618-19) consisted of eighty-four 
members and eighteen secular commissioners. 
Of these fifty-eight were Dutchmen, the rest 
foreigners. The whole Dutch delegation was 
orthodox, so that the case was decided unheard. 



108 Modern Religious Thought. 

The opinions of the Remonstrants had been 
summed up under five heads, and the Synod in 
reply used the same number of articles, which 
have since been known as the five points of Cal- 
vinism. A brief summary of the two statements 
may be in place. 

REMONSTRANTS. 

Article I. That God by an eternal purpose 
hath determined to save in Christ those who, 
through the grace of the Holy Spirit, shall believe 
on this his Son. 

Art. II. That, agreeably thereto, Christ died 
for all men and for every man ; yet that no 
one actually enjoys this forgiveness except the 
believer. 

Art. III. That man has not saving grace of 
himself, nor of the energy of his free will; but 
that it is necessary that he be renewed in under- 
standing, will, and all his powers. 

Art. IV. All good deeds or movements must 
be ascribed to the grace of God in Christ. But 
as respects the mode of its operation, grace is not 
irresistible. 

Art. V. Whether Christians are capable, 
through negligence, of forsaking the first begin- 



Post-Reformation Movements. 109 

* 

nings of their life in Christ, must be more particu- 
larly determined out of Holy Scripture. 

These articles are sufficient for salvation, so that 
it is not necessary to rise higher or descend 
deeper. 

CANONS OF THE SYNOD. 

First Head. Predestination. 

" As all men have sinned in Adam, God would 
have done no injustice in leaving them all to 
perish. . . . Election is of a definite number, not 
founded upon foreseen faith or any good quality." 

Second Head. Of the death of Christ and 
Redemption. 

" This was the sovereign counsel of God, that 
the saving efficacy of the death of his Son should 
extend to all the elect ; that he should effectually 
redeem all those, and those only, who were from 
eternity chosen to salvation." 

Third and Fourth Heads. Of the Corruption 
of Man and Conversion. 

"Revolting from his original purity, and abus- 
ing the freedom of his own will, man entailed on 
himself blindness of mind, horrible darkness, 
vanity, and perverseness of judgment ; became 
wicked, rebellious, and obdurate in heart and will, 



110 Modern Religious Thought. 

and impure in (all) his affections. . . . God 
seriously promises eternal life to as many as shall 
come to him and believe on him. It is not the 
fault of the Gospel nor of Christ nor of God 
that those called by the ministry of the Word 
refuse to come. The fault lies in themselves. 
. . . But that others obey the call is not to be 
ascribed to free will, but wholly to God. . . . 
This regeneration is not such a mode of operation 
that after God has performed his part it still 
remains in the power of man to be converted or 
not ; but it is not inferior in efficacy to creation, 
so that men are certainly, infallibly, and effectu- 
ally regenerated. . . . Wherefore the will thus 
renewed is not only actuated by God, but in con- 
sequence of this influence becomes itself active. 
Wherefore man is himself rightly said to believe 
and. repent, by virtue of that grace received." 

Fifth Head. Perseverance of Saints. 

Although the elect are not delivered in this life 
from the power of sin, " the weakness of the 
flesh cannot prevail against the power of God. 
Yet this certainty of perseverance is so far from 
exciting in believers a feeling of pride, or of 
rendering them carnally secure, that it is a source 
of humility, and of solid rejoicing in God." 



Post- Reformation Movements. Ill 

It seems strange to us that intelligent and pious 
men could prefer the confused and paradoxical 
statements of the third and fourth heads above, 
to the temperate and reasonable expressions of 
the Remonstrants on sin and conversion. The 
time was not favorable, however, for a candid dis- 
cussion and impartial adjustment of theological 
differences. Arminianism had a Romanizing color 
which was not attractive to men who had been for 
fifty years engaged in a life and death struggle 
against the Inquisition and the armies of Spain. 
The religious opinions of opponents were seen 
through a medium of prejudice which rendered a 
mutual understanding impossible. " A Spanish 
soldier, captured by the Dutch at the siege of 
Alkmaar, about to be executed, begged hard for 
his life. He finally promised to go down on his 
knees and worship the devil precisely as they did 
if he might live." 1 

Arminianism never became numerically strong 
in Holland, and is now a very small sect almost 
confined to Rotterdam and Amsterdam. But it 
gained a considerable influence in the English 
Church, and through the Methodist communion 
has become a great religious power. Macaulay 

1 Motley, Dutch Republic, II, p. 469. 



112 Modern Religious Thought. 

reports the witticism of the English churchman 
who when asked what the Arminians held replied : 
" They hold the best bishoprics and deaneries 
in England." 1 The important and praiseworthy- 
work which has been done by the Methodist 
Episcopal Church may seem to contradict what 
has been said above concerning the weakness of 
Arminianism as a Pelagian tendency. The criti- 
cisms advanced above apply to a thorough-going 
system of this type, which consistently holds to 
the native worth and freedom of man, and reduces 
Christianity to a system of philosophical proposi- 
tions and of vague impulses to moral living. 
This is not true of Methodism. The prayer and 
the doxology are Calvinistic, the sermon Arminian. 
The prayer : " O Lord, convert John Smith ; " 
the sermon: "John Smith, convert yourself;" 
the doxology : " Glory to God " — nofc to John 
Smith. Whatever may be the weaknesses of 
Methodism from a philosophical or a Pauline 

1 History of England, vol. I, p. 62. Macaulay says: "But, even 
before the meeting of the Dutch synod, that part of the Anglican 
clergy which was peculiarly hostile to the Calvinistic church govern- 
ment and to the Calvinistic worship had begun to regard with dislike 
the Calvinistic metaphysics; and this feeling was very naturally 
strengthened by the gross injustice, insolence, and cruelty of the party 
which was prevalent at Dort. Opinions which, at the time of the 
accession of James, no clergyman could have avowed without immi- 
nent risk of being stripped of his gown, were now the best title to 
preferment." 



Post-Reformation Movements. ±13 

standpoint, its practical earnestness combined with 
its theoretical inconsistency make it a very effec- 
tive working system. 

The first century after the Reformation is con- 
sidered the creed-making period of Protestantism. 
The century and a half succeeding the synod of 
Dort is a period of dry and unfruitful scholasti- 
cism. " The results of this scholasticism may be 
briefly indicated. Among the later theologians, 
personal living piety went on diminishing, and in 
place of faith, came knowledge about faith and 
orthodoxy, which was the means of leading to 
those petty controversies and hair-splitting dis- 
tinctions that characterize the dogmatic theology 
of that period. Disputations were carried on 
regarding the language of our first parents and 
the logic of the angels. The question was dis- 
cussed whether a single drop of Christ's blood 
would have been enough for the redemption of 
the human race ; whether the blood shed in Geth- 
semane remained united with the deity, and 
whether Christ at the day of judgment would 
show the scars of his wounds. It was the age of 
the most violent confessional polemics, when, on 
the Lutheran side, the inquiry was put, with all 



114 Modern Religious Thought. 

earnestness, whether the Calvinists should be 
called Christians ; and it was openly declared that 
there was more need to beware of the Calvinists 
than of the Catholics." 1 

1 Punjer, History of Philosophy of Religion, p. 177. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT, ESPE- 
CIALLY IN GERMANY. 



SECOND PERIOD. 



CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTION TO THE PERIOD. 

~VTT~E should have in mind an outline of the 
" * general history of the period we are now 
to discuss. About the time of the synod of Dort, 
the Thirty Years' War began. The influence of 
this prolonged struggle was most disastrous to all 
the best interests of civilized society. Many cities 
and flourishing towns were destroyed, the popula- 
tion was reduced one half, commerce was greatly 
crippled, art and learning languished. Aside from 
the injurious moral influence of such a protracted 
and bloody war, the cause of religion was unfav- 
orably affected because religious controversy en- 
tered largely into the struggle ; the general result 
was that there grew up in the minds of many a 
feeling of disgust in respect to religious contro- 
versy which made it possible to raise the question 
whether religion in general is a blessing or a curse 
to mankind. After the Thirty Years' War came 
the period of French influence under Louis XIV. 
Germany was further divided and humiliated ; the 

117 



118 



Modern Religious Thought. 



French language and literature were cultivated in 
all polite circles ; the German princes were edu- 
cated in France, and each endeavored in his little 
principality to imitate the magnificent despotism 
of Louis. Something of a national spirit was 
aroused by Frederick the Great, who came to the 
throne in 1740. After his . successful struggle 
with Austria some attempts at uniting the north 
German states were made, but were brought to a 
period by the calamities of the French conquest. 
In this period of humiliation a national and 
patriotic spirit was for the first time developed 
among the German people. After Napoleon's 
final defeat at Waterloo (1814) the German 
princes with one accord refused the people the 
constitutional reforms which had been lavishty 
promised during the struggles against France. 
During the succeeding controversy as to represen- 
tative government, orthodox Christianity was 
largely made odious to progressive men because 
employed by the oppressive governments as a 
weapon against the liberal tendencies of the time. 
The French Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 gave 
impulse to the liberal movement in Germany ; but 
the Frankfort Assembly (1848) could arrive at no 
definite and satisfactory policy, and Prussia and 



Introduction to the Period* 119 

Austria were therefore able to suppress the popu- 
lar movement. In the struggle with Austria for 
supremacy in Germany (1866), and with France 
for the first place on the Continent (1870), Prussia 
was triumphantly successful, and the outcome of 
the past thirty years appears in the towering mili- 
tary despotism of the German empire. 

The realization, however, of the patriot's dream 
of German unity has not brought the Golden Age. 
The traditional Hohenzollern-Bismarckian con- 
tempt for representative government asserts itself 
whenever the military policy is really opposed. 
Science and letters are encouraged, but the em- 
pirical reaction from the transcendental philoso- 
phy and the materialistic, brute-force policy of 
the government are unfavorable to high ideals. 
The government's conservative attitude towards 
religion is no real benefit to the cause of ortho- 
doxy, but furnishes a ready explanation of the 
socialistic rallying cry with which we are becoming 
so familiar : " Down with God and government." 
The cause of Christian truth is not advanced 
when the young German emperor informs his 
troops that, if commanded by him, they are in- 
stantly to shoot down their fathers or brothers, as 
he rules by divine right. The God of Luther is 



120 Modern Religious Thought. 

not commended to the best thought of Germany 
by being made responsible for the fantastic per- 
formances of this conceited young despot. It is 
evident, therefore, that the union of Church and 
State, which in the Italian Renaissance period was 
largely the cause of the Reformation struggle, 
perpetuates its evil influence through subsequent 
Protestant history. 

It will be helpful for the understanding of the 
general intellectual movement after the Reforma- 
tion to trace briefly the scientific and philosophical 
development. It is usually difficult to determine 
the exact limits between the scientific and the 
philosophical, and is especially so when, as is true 
of the early scholars of this period, the men to be 
studied are conspicuous in both lines of work ; as 
Descartes, who was known in his time as a mathe- 
matician and physicist rather than a philosopher. 
There is a more or less constant union between 
science and philosophy through all our modern 
thought; but science is in general distinguished 
from philosophy as being the empirical study of 
the facts and laws of Nature, as contrasted with 
that reflection on the scientific results which con- 
structs a comprehensive theory of the universe, 
and exhibits these scientific laws and facts in their 



Introduction to the Period, 121 

relation to the ultimate principles of being and 
knowledge. 

The purpose of science, as it originally appeared 
in modern times, was to introduce an ordered 
world instead of the confused world of the Middle 
Ages, ruled by the capricious power of saints and 
devils ; and to make man lord of Nature, its laws 
conducing to his comfort and pleasure, instead of 
its superstitious slave. In our repugnance to the 
extremes of the scientific tendency in our day, we 
should not fail to appreciate the great benefits 
science has conferred on our modern age. The 
superstitious ignorance of three or four centuries 
ago seems something incredible. It is well known 
that Luther believed that he was personally 
assailed by the devil. He was convinced that 
demoniacal possession was a somewhat common 
occurrence in his time. He speaks somewhere of 
a certain child whose peculiar actions indicated 
that he was possessed by the devil ; it was Luther's 
opinion that the child should be thrown into the 
river. 

I will refer to the common opinions on astrol- 
ogy and witchcraft, as showing the general 
state of culture. 1 Belief in astrology is very 

iEncy. Brit., vol. II, pp. 742, 743; vol. XXIV, pp. 619-623 



122 Modern Religious Thought. 

ancient, and the popular belief in it persisted 
long after the discoveries of modern astronomy 
made it scientifically impossible. During Luther's 
lifetime a prediction was published of a universal 
deluge for the year 1524 — a year which unfortu- 
nately turned out to be unusually dry. The pre- 
diction was believed far and wide, and a distin- 
guished official at Toulouse, in France, built 
himself a Noah's Ark in expectation of the com- 
ing flood. ' The theologian Theodore Beza ex- 
pected the second coming of Christ, because of 
the appearance of an unusually brilliant periodic 
star in 1573. The Emperor Charles V and King 
Francis I of France both engaged astrologers to 
fight their battles. Their prophecies affected the 
public funds much as telegrams do nowadays. 
It was reserved for Dean Swift to laugh astrology 
out of the more cultured circles of England by 
his squib : " Prediction for 1708, by Isaac Bicker- 
staff, Esq." 

Witchcraft was a crime in Roman law, and has 
been a subject of legislation in all modern nations. 
A vigorous crusade against witchcraft was insti- 
tuted by Innocent VIII, the reigning pope at the 
time of Luther's birth. A few years later was 
published the great text-book on procedure in 



Introduction to the Period. 123 

witchcraft cases — " Malleus Maleficarum," or 
" Hexenhammer." Through the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries executions for witchcraft 
were common in all European countries. The 
number of victims was perhaps greater in Ger- 
many than in any other country. It was in 
Germany that the last execution for witchcraft 
in Europe took place, at Posen in 1793. 

Science was not only to free men from the 
chains of superstition, but also to confer unspeak- 
able blessings upon the happy generations of the 
future. The scientific discoveries of the sixteenth 
century, extending amazingly the bounds of 
human knowledge, gave the students of that day 
the loftiest conceptions as to the possibilities of 
human achievement in the sphere of scientific 
investigation. As a result the literature of the 
time gave birth to many Utopian schemes of 
universal reform, and the most extravagant expec- 
tations were cherished as to the progress and 
felicity attainable by the race, when the supersti- 
tion of the past should be destroyed and science 
should be enthroned as the queen of a regenerated 
world. Bacon's remarkable fragment, The New 
Atlantis, is an interesting revelation of the scien- 
tific mind in that age. A ship in the Pacific is 



124 Modern Religious Thought. 

driven far from her course to the south, and finds 
there a fortunate country where none of the evils 
of European society are known, where the people 
have attained to an extraordinary degree of pros- 
peri t}^ and happiness under the wise administra- 
tion of a group of sages known as the " Order of 
Solomon's House." These are men who possess 
the secrets of all ancient learning, and who are 
supplied by the state with unlimited facilities for 
scientific research. The state reaps the benefit of 
their labors, in the wisest sanitary arrangements, 
and an infinity of ingenious appliances which pro- 
long the lives and promote the general welfare of 
the citizens. The imagination of Bacon here 
aims to picture the ideal state. A member of the 
Order of Solomon's House states to him the pur- 
pose of the Order in these words : " The End of 
our Foundation is the knowledge of causes and 
secret motions of things ; and the enlarging the 
bounds of Human Empire to the effecting of all 
things possible." * Superstition is to be destroyed, 
and the race made free and happy by science. 
The result of these various tendencies appears in 
the scientific conceptions of the time ; the world 
is a mechanism, an invariable quantity of matter 

1 Bacon's Works, vol. iii, p. 158. 



Introduction to the Period. 125 

and force operating with the regularity and pre- 
cision of a perfect machine. It is evident that 
free spiritual beings whose activities cannot be 
controlled by, and expressed in terms of, the laws 
of physical motion would introduce elements of 
uncertainty into the universal mechanism such as 
would defeat the scientific purpose. Hence from 
Descartes down there is a growing tendency to 
exclude God and human free will more and more 
rigidly from the machine of nature. It is well to 
note this scientific assumption appearing at the 
dawn of modern science, as affecting traditional 
Christianity, a revelation based upon mira*cles. 
The thorough-going application of this scientific 
assumption of the supremacy of the law of com- 
mon experience plainly renders it impossible that 
the records of miraculous occurrences, as we find 
them in the Christian Scriptures, should be 
regarded as veritable history. 

Philosophical speculation begins first in appar- 
ent submission to churchly authority, though with 
a principle of doubt which was suspected from 
the first by the orthodox. Descartes attempts, 
not very successfully, to make a place in his 
mechanical theory for human free will; and he 
believes he can demonstrate the existence of God. 



126 Modem Religious Thought. 

Locke sets out to destroy innate ideas, and estab- 
lishes sensationalism — the mind a tabula rasa to 
receive sense-impressions. Berkeley, in the prac- 
tical outcome of his system, dissolves the external 
world into an illusion, and Hume does the same 
for the Ego, so that complete skepticism results. 
In the meantime Spinoza has developed a panthe- 
istic doctrine of one substance with two attri- 
butes — thought and extension ; and Leibnitz, fol- 
lowing his individualistic tendency, constructs a 
world from a system of beings — monads — like 
Spinoza's substance in including the universe and 
in being related to nothing without, but acting as 
though related because of pre established harmony. 
On this system, after Wolff, a rationalistic account 
of all things in earth and heaven was based. 

Kant was a Wolffian in early life, but was 
"roused by Hume from his dogmatic slumber." 
He held that the mind is active in knowledge, the 
mind being not a tabula rasa but furnishing certain 
intellectual forms into which the content of sen- 
sation is received and molded. Kant's general 
result, however, was skeptical; we know only 
phenomena, and the reason is trustworthy only 
when regulated by sense-experience. The moral 
ideas — God, free will, and immortality — cannot be 



Introduction to the Period. 127 

demonstrated on grounds of reason. The practi- 
cal reason, however, brings us to these moral ideas 
which cannot be proven on theoretical grounds ; 
they must be assumed to satisfy the moral need 
of man, who feels himself obligated to obey a 
moral law. The strong personality of Kant — 
equally powerful in intellect and intense in moral 
feeling — was able to hold in something like unity 
the apparently contradictory principles of the 
pure and the practical reason ; the way was not 
long, however, to the conclusions of such men as 
Lange and Feuerbach, that Kant's system issues in 
skepticism on the theoretical and illusion on the 
practical side. 

Kant's critical work aroused a most extra- 
ordinary enthusiasm* for philosophy among the 
young students of Germany, and became the 
source of a remarkable speculative develop- 
ment. Fichte undertook to deduce all things 
from the subjective activity of the " Reines 
Ich," though in his later years his system took on 
a more objective and also a mystical character. 
He was most influenced by the moral side of 
Kant's system, being by nature an orator and a 
preacher of righteousness ; Nature was to him 
merely " the possibility of the fulfillment of the 



128 Modern Religious Thought. 

moral law." Schelling's " Identitats-system " 
forms the transition to a more objective position, 
when the giant of the transcendental philosophy 
appears in the person of Hegel. He is the sys- 
temizer who brings to completion the fruitful sug- 
gestions of his predecessors in the field of idealism, 
devoting the stores of his great learning, a mar- 
velous dialectical acuteness, and an infinite toil 
and patience to the impossible task of deducing 
the real universe of life and being from the 
abstract movement of absolute thought. " Hegel 
starts from the Idea, and professes by the force 
of dialectic alone to make all things spring from 
the Idea. This includes the Absolute, which is 
the pure idea considered in itself and in an 
abstract manner ; Nature, which is the idea mani- 
fested and become object ; and Spirit, which is the 
idea turning back upon itself and beholding itself 
as soul, as society, and as God. God is to Hegel 
the concrete unity, the idea determining itself, 
the generating principle of immanence. Religion 
is the consciousness which God has of himself in 
finite being ; or, again, it is the spirit which is 
conscious of its essence." 1 We find here an 
idealistic pantheism where the real physical world 

1 Lichtenberger, Hist. German Theol., p. 15. 



Introduction to the Period. 129 

and the personal finite spirit have vanished in the 
void abyss of the Absolute. The idealistic vein 
is worked out to the very end, and nothing 
remains for Hegel's followers but to wrangle over 
the obscurities of their master, in the devout faith 
that in this philosophy, if it could be understood, 
are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, 
or to struggle back as best they may to a terra 
firma of real existences. All the conflicting parties, 
however, have abandoned the Hegelian dialectic; 
this method is already an historic reminiscence. 
Of the extreme left wing Feuerbach runs out 
into a practical atheism, making the Deity an 
illusion, an objectivized form of the finite per- 
sonality; the more moderate of the school, of 
whom Biedermann is a worthy representative, 
endeavor with very indifferent success to retain 
the chief elements of the Hegelian system while 
giving a substantial reality to the physical world 
and the finite spirit. It was Hegel's avowed 
purpose to exhibit the essential content of the 
Christian religion in unassailable philosophical 
form ; but it is now generally perceived that 
the result is an abstract speculative form from 
which the genuinely historical and Christian 
content has been rigidly excluded. There are 



130 Modern Religious Thought, 

still scholars, however, who are engaged in the 
unpromising task of galvanizing the pantheistic 
corpse into some manifestation of useful religious 
activity. 

The most permanently influential element of 
Hegel's work is connected with his doctrine of 
nature and history as a rational development. 
His system is thus in accord with the scientific 
theory of the universal reign of law as associated 
with evolution — his system being an exposition, 
from the standpoint of abstract thought, of the 
evolution theory which the scientist seeks to 
establish b} r study of the actual and historic con- 
crete facts. His most remarkable influence in 
this field, at least as far as concerns our purpose, 
has been in relation to the principles of historic 
criticism. The effect of the Hegelian philosophy 
upon this field of research was well-nigh revolu- 
tionary. Before Hegel's time men felt that the 
facts of history were so remote, our knowledge 
concerning them was so scanty, that it was impos- 
sible to do more than to join in probable sequence 
a series of statements concerning battles, sieges, 
rising and falling dynasties, etc. But if history is 
a rational development, a movement according to 
the laws of thought, and this thought is our 



Introduction to the Period. 131 

thought, then we have the ready means at hand 
for bridging by probable conjecture the gaps 
where historic knowledge fails, and for giving life 
and reality to the story of the past by painting its 
men and women in the warm and vivid tints of 
common human experience. It is evident that 
Hegel here joins hands again with the scientific 
assumption that law is everywhere supreme — an 
alliance ominous for mythological tales of every 
sort, whether connected with Mount Olympus or 
with Sinai and Calvary ; for this law is the law of 
our thought, of common everyday experience 
which knows no miracle. This is in essence the 
principle from which the Tubingen school of 
criticism sets out, of which Friedrich Christian 
Baur is usually considered the founder. His 
critical work, and later Strauss' mythical theory 
of the New Testament history, are merely the 
systematic and thorough application of those 
principles for reconstructing history which are 
the inevitable outcome of the philosophic and 
scientific development down to their day. 
Edward Zeller, son-in-law of Baur, and well repre- 
senting the general spirit of the Tubingen school, 
says : " The scientific proof of the fact of a mir- 
acle is simply impossible, because the assumption 



132 Modern Religious Thought. 

of it can rest only on the credibility of testi- 
mony ; the credibility of a witness, however, can 
be judged only after the analogy of other expe- 
rience, and therefore events which contradict every 
analogy of experience, be the evidence what it 
will, can never have in their favor the prepon- 
derating probability." * This proposition is simply 
and undeniably true, if " scientific proof" is taken 
in the sense it has in the world of science — ex- 
planation of phenomena after the analogy of natu- 
ral law and common experience. Zeller here gives 
a clear and courageous statement of what is in 
reality the fundamental critical principle (whether 
or not all are conscious of it or are willing to 
avow it) of the advanced schools of criticism 
to-day. We need not be surprised, therefore, if 
the results of such criticism are destructive. The 
mysterious point, to the plain man, is that these 
men should deem it worth while to devote years 
of patient and microscopic industry to determine 
whether the New Testament can be accepted as 
sober history, when their first critical assumption 
declares the Scriptural history of Jesus to be 
simple mythology. 

Between the extremes of the Hegelian critical 

1 Geschichte der Deutschen Phil., p. 156. 



Introduction to the Period. 133 

school and the conservatism of the old orthodoxy 
stands the mediating school, of which Neander 
and Dorner are well-known representatives. This 
school aims to bring the essential content of the 
traditional Christian doctrines into satisfying 
unity with the best results of modern science and 
culture. 

The theological party, however, which is of 
leading interest in Germany to-day is that popu- 
larly known as the Ritschlian. This school 
regards the chaotic state of theology to-day as 
the inevitable result of the historic development 
which has given the intellectual the preponder- 
ance in the Christian system. The Ritschlians, 
therefore, set up the apparently promising prin- 
ciple that metaphysical dogma and philosophical 
presuppositions must be banished from theology, 
or held rigidly subordinate to the moral elements 
of the simple Scriptural Christianity of the early 
church and the Reformation. The position of 
this school suggests in a striking way the appar- 
ent impossibility of freeing German theology from 
philosophical presuppositions ; for while profess- 
ing to cut clear entirely from metaphysics, it sets 
out from the conclusions of Kant's Practical 
Reason, which is commonly regarded in the phil- 



134 Modern Religious Thought. 

osophical world as the weak and perishable 
portion of Kant's work. Aside from the incon- 
sistency of building upon a metaphysical system 
a theology which claims as its supreme excel- 
lence that it is scriptural and historical rather 
than metaphysical, the presence of the common 
critical assumptions is clearly apparent in the 
interpretation of Scripture and the historic church 
doctrines. 

It will be our task to trace out, with such full- 
ness of detail as our limited space will permit, the 
theological development indicated above. 

There is an interesting parallel between the 
development of Greek thought and the specula- 
tive movement in modern times. Each sets out 
from a popular religion, more or less corrupted by 
ignorance and superstition, in pursuit of a satis- 
fying theory of life and the world. It first 
takes on the form of a naive realism, which is 
soon reduced by a deepening critical conscious- 
ness to an apparently hopeless skepticism (the 
Sophists, Hume). Now appears the great 
reformer (Socrates, Kant) of imperial intellect 
and strong moral feeling, a many-sided personality 
which harmonizes the opposing aspects of truth, 
suggesting the germinal principles and giving 



Introduction to the Period. 135 

impulse and direction for the succeeding develop- 
ment. And as the reformer's primary interest was 
moral, his teaching first bears fruit in the preacher 
of righteousness, the orator, the poet, of the 
school (Plato, Fichte), who clothes the ethical 
doctrines of the master in forms the more attrac- 
tive to the common consciousness because their 
vague outlines leave room for the play of religious 
sentiment and the transfiguring halo of a poetic 
mysticism . And now the intellectualism of the 
reformer asserts itself in the systemizer of the 
school (Aristotle, Hegel), who ruthlessly sweeps 
away the poetic illusions of the preceding teacher 
and gives the system a rigid logical consistency. 
The system is now exalted as the final philosophy, 
its clear and simple principles pointing the way to 
the goal of all truth ; but it is the clearness of 
the shallow pool as contrasted with the depth and 
mystery of the ocean. It is soon discovered that 
such philosophical formulas do not adequately 
express the struggle and passion, the wonder and 
beauty of the unfolding universe. And so there 
succeeds an eclectic age, when men drift helplessly 
here and there in search of a satisfying truth. 
This period of ancient philosophy was terminated 
by the miraculous appearance of a religion of 



136 Modern Religious Thought. 

revelation. What shall be the outcome of our 
modern eclectic age ? When one considers the 
tremendous forces arrayed against our faith to-day, 
he must feel that if Christianity succeeds in 
making good its claim to intellectual and moral 
supremacy, a miracle will be wrought scarcely less 
noteworthy than that of its original manifesta- 
tion. If Christianity can vindicate its title to 
empire against the opposition of a materialistic 
science and a godless culture, this fiery test will 
go far to show that it comes from God and is 
designed by him to rule the ages of human history. 
It may be well to suggest here that the group 
of men we shall consider in this paper may give 
a wrong impression as to the state of religion 
among the German people in general. These men 
and the type of thought they represent are, for 
the most part, heretical in one or more points; 
they represent the movement in Germany of 
what we call liberal thought — the effort to 
reckon with traditional Christianity from the 
standpoint of present philosophy and culture. I 
am satisfied that there is as much of orthodoxy 
and real piety among the common people of 
Germany as among the same class here, though 
the forms of its expression are different. The 



Introduction to the Period, 137 

debates of the schools and the discussions of the 
learned, with us in America, stand often in very 
remote connection with the real life of our 
people ; and this is yet more the case in Germany, 
especially as regards theological discussion. With 
us a man who is expelled from an orthodox com- 
munion moves to Pennsylvania and establishes a 
new sect, or betakes himself to some city and 
organizes a People's Church where his theological 
hobby can be exhibited without let or hindrance. 
In German pulpits theological and critical ques- 
tions are studiously avoided ; there are few or no 
allusions to current literature, science, etc., even 
by way of illustration; the sermon is a simple 
exposition of the text, with an application to the 
personal life. We should understand, then, that 
the theological battles are largely fought out in 
the universities, and that the opinions of the dis- 
putants may be less representative of the beliefs 
of the masses than is the case with us. It is pos- 
sible that a German professor, even of a consider- 
able reputation as an author, may no more fairly 
represent the average of public opinion than does 
Colonel Ingersoll or Herr Most with us. As 
students we are reading constantly the books of 
representatives of the liberal German schools, who 



138 Modem Religious Thought. 

proclaim their doctrine as the culmination of the 
thought-movement of the ages, and commonly 
give the impression that all Germany is or soon 
will be of that opinion. It is much as though 
Colonel Ingersoll should trace the movement of 
liberal thought since the Reformation, find every- 
where premonitions of his religion of good-fellow- 
ship, and close his work with the assertion that all 
intelligent Americans now hold his views. It is 
the unusual occurrences, the out-of-the-way per- 
sons and things, which attract attention and get 
into the papers, and also very often into the most 
popular books and magazines. It is the freaks of 
nature, — the bearded lady, the what-is-it, — not 
the average well-formed American citizen, which 
are exhibited in the museums and advertised in 
the public prints. The people of Germany read 
daily in their papers a few lines of " American 
News " : a train robbery, a Kentucky neighbor- 
hood war, two Texas girls in love with the same 
cowboy and fighting a bloody duel to settle the 
case. These are striking and interesting inci- 
dents ; but they give the German citizen, who has 
no other sources of information concerning Amer- 
ica, a wrong impression of American manners and 
civilization. I am persuaded that the opinions 



Introduction to the Period. 139 

concerning Germany of many intelligent people 
among us, formed from hysterical denunciations 
of German rationalism, and also from the noisy 
liberal literature of Germany, are not much more 
accurate than their notions about us ; and I hesi- 
tate to devote the rest of my space to the discus- 
sion of a line of heretics, lest I may aid in 
spreading the belief that there is no orthodox 
theology or religion in the Fatherland. There is 
much simple and beautiful piety, much devout 
learning, in the land of Luther; and I wish 
the limits of this work would allow me to do 
justice to these pleasing traits of the German 
religious life. My task, however, — a worthy and 
important one, — is to describe the attempts of the 
earnest and gifted men of that country who have 
striven to reconcile the faith of our fathers with 
the canons of modern thought and feeling. 
"Happy is the nation," no doubt, whose life, 
religious as well as political, " has no history " ; 
and while it were well for us to contemplate much 
more than we do edifying examples of unquestion- 
ing faith, yet it remains true that honest doubt is 
often the first step in the way of progress ; and an 
earnest attempt to grapple with the intellectual 
enemies of faith may be a fruitful subject for 



140 Modem Religious Thought. 

study, if not in positive result, at least as a warn- 
ing against error. 

With the growth of culture in Europe appeared 
in each country the inevitable attempt of liberated 
reason to reckon with revealed religion. In each 
country the movement took a characteristic form ; 
in England deism, in France materialism, in Ger- 
many rationalism. English conservatism and the 
tendency to compromise between the old and the 
new appears in allowing God to create the world 
and give the mechanism the first start ; but now 
he must not interfere with the running of the 
universal machine, for he is expected to sit on his 
distant throne, in decorous majesty, much as Queen 
Victoria is the theoretical source of all law and 
authority, but practically a nonentity in her king- 
dom. The French tendency to the original and 
the spectacular results in the atheistic materialism 
which would reduce the universe to a concourse 
of atoms, and delights to shock the sensibilities 
of the pious by insisting that man is a higher 
development of the ape. In Germany, however, 
the problem takes the form of rationalism. Here 
is presented a fascinating group of metaphysical 
and historical problems ; let us enjoy, them ; let 
us take plenty of time and dig all round them and 



Introduction to the Period. 141 

under them ; let us expose and refute the hasty 
and superficial conclusions of the English and the 
French, and thus exalt the honor of German eru- 
dition and confirm our title to the empire of the 
air. The outcome of deism as compared with 
rationalism in relation to Christianity is note- 
worthy. Deism — natural religion — was destroyed 
by Hume's critical skepticism, and its remnants 
were absorbed by the Church. Hume's criticism 
annihilated natural religion, so that the dilemma 
seemed clearly presented — faith or reason, tradi- 
tional Christianity or practical atheism. Later 
German philosophy for the most part tries to save 
Christianity, by bringing it into some statement 
which shall harmonize with prevalent thought. 
The result is a perversion of Christianity, so 
that the question may fairly be raised whether 
the hostility of philosophy would not have better 
served the interests of the traditional faith. 
After Hume, in England, there is a general aver- 
sion to philosophical speculation, as destructive of 
all that the heart holds holy. We find in England 
little or nothing similar to the ambitious post- 
Kantian systems. 1 

1 Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, 
p. 59. 



CHAPTER II. 

LEIBNITZ AND WOLFF. 

/~\UR previous discussion has shown that the 
^^^ post-Reformation theology ran out into a dry 
and unfruitful scholasticism which reduced Chris- 
tianity to a group of intellectual propositions. In 
the latter part of the seventeenth century the 
healthy religious feeling of the German people 
reasserted itself in the pietistic movement, under 
Spenerand Francke. The University of Halle was 
founded by the pietistic party, and this type of 
the religious life became widely influential towards 
the beginning of the eighteenth century. The 
school was thoroughly orthodox in doctrine, but 
found the essence of Christianity not so much in 
creed-subscription as in a change of heart and 
purity of life. Now appeared, however, the be- 
ginnings of the characteristic movement of the 
time, in the rationalism of the Leibnitz- Wolffi an 
school. The first serious struggle occurred at 
Halle, where Wolff had been appointed professor 
of mathematics in 1706. He soon broadened the 

142 



Leibnitz and Wolff, 143 

field of his academic activity to include lectures 
on the general lines of philosophy, and his lec- 
tures, which were delivered in the German 
language, soon became very popular. His deter- 
mined purpose to subject all revealed truth to the 
test of reason brought him into conflict with the 
pietistic theologians of the university, and the 
struggle culminated in Wolff's expulsion from 
the university in 1723. It is said that the con- 
sideration which brought King Frederick William 
to a decision in the matter was not so much a 
suspicion of the pride of reason in the abstract 
as a concrete case which was used to illustrate the 
dangerous tendency of Wolff's teachings. It was 
asserted that, according to Wolff's deterministic 
doctrine of the will, if one of the King's giant 
guards should desert, he could not justly be pun- 
ished, for he would have done only what had been 
predetermined for him to do. Wolff was ordered 
to leave Halle and Prussian territory within forty- 
eight hours under penalty of the halter. He 
removed to the university of Marburg, and the 
heated controversy which followed greatly aided 
the general diffusion of the Wolffian doctrines. 
In the course of the next twenty-five years 
Wolff's system became the dominant philosophical 



144 Modern Religious Thought, 

influence in Germany, and remained so till the 
rise of the critical philosophy of Kant. 

The philosophical problems which confronted 
Leibnitz were those raised by the system of 
Descartes — substance, and the interaction of 
spiritual and material substances. Leibnitz 
answered the first by a dynamic rather than mate- 
rialistic theory of the physical world; that the 
ultimate elements of the universe are not physical 
atoms but spiritual monads ; the primal principle 
is not matter but force. The second problem is 
solved by the denial of interaction, causal rela- 
tion, of any sort in the world. Each monad is 
a microcosm which in its perceptive power mirrors 
the universe, and in its active power moves in 
harmony with the other monads, yet both percep- 
tion and motion result from a system of preestab- 
lished harmony, which dispenses with any influence 
or causal relation between the states and activities 
of the monad and the outer universe. Each 
monad contains within itself the knowledge of all 
truth, but this knowledge is for the most part 
possessed unconsciously ; in the lower forms of 
the physical and animal world the knowledge is 
almost- entirely unconscious, while there is a 



Leibnitz and Wolff. 145 

constantly increasing clearness of consciousness as 
one advances through the higher animal forms to 
man. All knowledge therefore is really innate, 
and the progress of the soul-monad is in elevating 
into the light of consciousness the elements of 
truth previously held unconsciously. A monad 
which knows itself thoroughly, through and 
through, would be a deity, possessing all knowl- 
edge. Leibnitz shared decidedly the philosophical 
tendency of his time which sought to express all 
life in terms of intellect, the ideal being to intro- 
duce into every sphere, even ethics and religion, 
the rigid precision of mathematics. In his early 
life Leibnitz was greatly interested in the idea of 
a "philosophical calculus," which should supple- 
ment the ordinary logical and scientific methods 
after the analogy of the higher mathematics, and 
by means of which, through the elaboration of 
fundamental notions, propositions could be proven 
and new truth gained. It is evident that the 
monad system readily harmonizes with this de- 
cidedly intellectual tendency. The perfection of 
the monad, whether taken alone or in the group 
which constitutes an individual, lies in the com- 
plete development of its knowledge. Will, in 
man, manifests itself in certain activities neces 



146 Modern Religious Thought. 

sarily connected with certain ideas, and the aim 
of ethical activity is happiness — the growing 
sense of completeness of being. As the perfection 
of the spiritual being lies in clearness of ideas, 
from which rational activities necessarily flow, the 
tendency is apparent to exalt thought far above 
will as the ruling mental faculty. The same is 
true in relation to feeling ; feeling is a state of 
imperfect, indistinct knowledge. The sense of the 
beautiful arises from the order and regularity of 
indistinct sense impressions ; pleasures of sense in 
general are to be " referred to the indistinct per- 
ception of an intellectual pleasure." 1 

We therefore find in Leibnitz an emphasis of 
the intellectual, the supremacy of reason, as strong 
as in any English sensationalist or French mate- 
rialist ; and at the same time Leibnitz is an ortho- 
dox Christian. He indignantly repudiates the 
insinuation of Bayle that faith and reason are 
irreconcilable, and it therefore remains only for 
each man to choose which he prefers and abandon 
the other. Leibnitz very justly asserts it is im- 
possible to believe that which is unreasonable, and 
his purpose is so to deal with Christianity that the 
limits of faith and of reason shall be clearly 

1 Zeller, Geschichte der Deutschcn Phil., p. 118. 



Leibnitz and Wolff, 147 

drawn, and it shall be made clear that Christianity 
contains nothing which may not be reasonably 
believed. " In matters of religion to be willing 
to disregard reason is in my eyes an almost sure 
indication of an egotism which approaches fanati- 
cism, or, what is yet worse, of hypocrisy." It is 
apparent that we have in this system, reposing 
peacefully side by side as though unconscious of 
their coming warfare, the principles representing 
the antagonistic forces which have rent the modern 
world. Rationalism thus enters the field of Ger- 
man thought as the champion of Christianity ; 
and in fact all through subsequent history the 
liberal thought of Germany has usually retained 
this avowed purpose, and for the most part sin- 
cerely. The suspicions of the pietists of Halle, 
however, in reference to Wolff's specious attempt 
to make Christianity reasonable, have been fully 
justified by the subsequent development. Under 
the treatment of its rationalistic defenders Chris- 
tianity has been gradually transformed until the 
logical and inevitable outcome of the movement 
appears in the Logos (reason) religion of Hegel, 
where the traditional and historical elements of 
Christianity have simply vanished. 

In reconciling faitlf and reason, Leibnitz makes 



148 Modern Religious Thought. 

a distinction between that which is above reason 
and that which is contrary to reason. A revela- 
tion concerned with the infinite and eternal may 
be expected to contain much not readily compre- 
hensible to finite creatures, yet it must not con- 
tradict the general laws of human thought. In 
this region which transcends but does not contra- 
dict reason, Leibnitz finds place for the miracles 
of Christian history. The physical laws of the 
universe have as their end the perfection of the 
world, and are subordinate to the moral purposes 
of the Creator. It is not unreasonable, therefore, 
that these lower physical laws should be at times 
superseded by an activity in accordance with a 
higher spiritual law. Leibnitz undertook to demon- 
strate the existence of God, necessarily assumed 
as the source of the preestablished harmon}^ and 
as supplying the infinite mind in which the eternal 
truths of reason are grounded. He also used the 
cosmological and ontological arguments, in forms 
corresponding with his philosophical standpoint. 
It is evident that in his doctrine of innate knowl- 
edge — all truth slumbering unconsciously in the 
mind — is found the impulse to extend the use of 
the reason far beyond the realm of experience, in 
the attempt to penetrate the infinite mysteries; 



Leibnitz and Wolff. 149 

a tendency carried to such extremes in the 
Wolffian school as to give rise to the critical 
reaction of Kant. 

Wolff was not a man of original creative power, 
but is of importance as the systemizer and popular 
expositor of Leibnitz. Leibnitz's doctrines, which 
had been discussed in letters and brief treatises, 
are here brought into unity and developed into a 
system comprehending all branches of learning. 
There are slight departures from the position of 
Leibnitz in some particulars, as, that preestablished 
harmony is applied only to the union of the body 
and the soul, while a physical influence is assumed 
between lower beings. The most marked general 
difference concerns the relation of God to the 
world. To the profound and penetrating spirit of 
Leibnitz, the divine Being, while transcending the 
world, was yet the immanent principle of reason 
and order in it. To the matter-of-fact under- 
standing of Wolff, God seems to create and govern 
the world from without, with the general purpose 
to advance the comfort and well-being of men ; 
much as a carpenter builds a house, with a view 
to the satisfaction of its future possessors. 

Pure philosophy, according to Wolff, deals with 
God, the soul, and the physical world — Theology, 



150 Modern Religious Thought. 

Psychology, and Cosmology. Natural theology is 
carefully distinguished from the revealed knowl- 
edge of divine truth. The former is useful as 
laying a basis for faith in truth naturally known ; 
for in it the existence of God, his principal attri- 
butes, the immortality of the soul, etc., are con- 
clusively demonstrated. Wolff's general method 
— a concisely stated proposition, followed by a 
quasi-mathematical demonstration — maybe illus- 
trated by the first few sections in his Prolegomena 
to the " Theologia Naturalis." 

§ I. Natural theology is the science of those 
things which are possible through God ; that is, of 
those things which relate to him and are known 
to be possible through those things which relate 
to him. 

§ II. All things treated in natural theology 
must be demonstrated. Natural theology must be 
a science (§ I). Wherefore, since science has 
the method of demonstrating what we affirm or 
deny (§ 594 Logic), those things which are treated 
in natural theology must be demonstrated. 

§ III. One who studies natural theology ac- 
quires certain knowledge of God. 

§ IV. In natural theology the existence of 
God must be demonstrated. 



Leibnitz and Wolff. 151 

On the title-page of the second volume of the 
Theologia Naturalis (Leipsig, 1741) Wolff sets 
forth the important results he expects to accom- 
plish. " Part Second, in which the Existence and 
Attributes of God are demonstrated from the 
Notion of the Most Perfect Being, the nature of 
the soul is proven, and the Foundations of 
Atheism, Deism, Fatalism, Naturalism, Spinozism, 
and other errors concerning God are overthrown." 
The existence of God is proven by the cosmologi- 
cal and ontological arguments ; from the depend- 
ence of all natural things, a self-existent Creator 
must be assumed ; and from our notion of a most 
perfect being we conclude the necessary existence 
of God. 

Wolff refers to miracles and revelation both in 
the Cosmology and the Natural Theology. 

Cosmology, § 510. " That is supernatural, the 
sufficient reason of which is not contained in the 
essence and nature of being. It is also called 
miraculous." 

Then follow twenty-four propositions minutely 
discussing the relation of the miraculous to the 
natural. I give three of these : — 

§ 525. A motion, which does not conform to the 
laws of motion, is not natural but miraculous. 



152 Modern Religious Thought. 

§ 526. Miraculous motion is contrary to the 
laws of motion. 

§ 527. Laws of motion are not absolutely 
necessary but contingent. 

§ ^48 to § 496 of the Natural Theology deal with 
revelation. "That God should reveal his will 
to men is not impossible. A revelation of God 
cannot be made immediately to man except by 
miracle." Beginning with § 451, Wolff gives 
various criteria for testing the genuineness of an 
alleged revelation : — 

(1) " A divine revelation ought to contain 
things necessary to be known by man, but which 
can be learned in no other way." 

(2) " Things which are divinely revealed must 
not be in the least antagonistic to the divine attri- 
butes. In a divine revelation contradictions have 
no possible place. That is said to be above reason 
which cannot be proven from principles of reason ; 
but that is said to be against reason which is 
repugnant to or contradicts the principles of 
reason." After a series of trivial propositions 
the conclusion is reached (§ 462) : " Mysteries 
do not contradict the principles of reason," and 
(§463) "In a divine revelation there is a place 
for mysteries." 



Leibnitz and Wolff, 153 

(3) "Divine revelation cannot contain that 
which contradicts reason and experience." 

(4) " Divine revelation cannot teach that which 
is repugnant to the law of nature and the essence 
and nature of the soul." 

(5) " If it is possible to show how he who 
affirms that something has been divinely revealed 
to him, by the use of the natural faculties of the 
mind, would have been able to arrive at the 
knowledge of that which he asserts as divinely 
revealed ; it is not necessary to hold this as 
divinely revealed." 

After discussing for twenty propositions reve- 
lations by means of dreams and visions, he con- 
cludes with the instructive proposition (§ 487), 
" That which becomes known to any one through 
natural vision, should not be held to be divinely 
revealed ; but that which becomes known through 
supernatural vision, that is divinely revealed." 

(6) " God does not effect through a miracle 
what may be accomplished naturally." 

(7) " In a divine revelation particular things 
ought to be uttered in those words and repre- 
sented under those figures by means of which he to 
whom the revelation is made may thoroughly un- 
derstand the mind of God, who speaks or reveals." 



154 Modern Religious Thought. 

Wolff proceeds here to discuss the number 
of words which should be used, — no more 
and no less than will answer the purpose, — 
and concludes the discussion of revelation with 
the proposition (§496): "In a divine revelation 
the style should conform not less to the universal 
rules of grammar than of rhetoric." 

I have given this much space to Wolff's treat- 
ment of revelation, because in it is found nearly 
all the material used by the rationalists of the 
Aufklarung, and it is presented in a way entirely 
characteristic of the period. In treating of reve- 
lation, every minute and trivial detail must be 
discussed pro and con and subjected to the 
scrutiny of so-called reason. Wolff remarks con- 
cerning the possibility of revelation (under 
§ 449) : " It is possible, either that God should 
produce sounds in the air such as are produced by 
the vocal organs, so that he to whom He reveals 
his will should seem to hear God speaking to him ; 
or that God should produce motions in the audi- 
tory organ such as are produced by the voice of 
one speaking ; or that perceptions should be pro- 
duced in the mind such as arise when we hear one 
speaking. It is therefore clear that it is not 
impossible that God should reveal his will to 



Leibnitz and Wolff, 155 

men." It is evident that this method of treating 
the miraculous, however sincere the writer's pur- 
pose might be to demonstrate its possibility, must 
inevitably produce just the contrary effect in a 
period of marked skeptical tendency. To bring 
forth the miracle from the obscurity of mystery, 
and rigidly excluding the ideality of religious 
feeling, to analyze every step of the miraculous 
process in the light of a matter-of-fact reason, 
exhausting the resources of a cumbrous learning 
and a prolix and tedious method of exposition in 
the minute elucidation of every trivial detail, — 
the result could only be to bring out into clear 
and possibly ludicrous distinctness the apparently 
insuperable repugnance of the miracle to the 
common sense of mankind. It was therefore not 
surprising that the alliance between orthodoxy 
and the Wolffian philosophy was of a troubled 
and transient character, and that Wolff's state- 
ment of the orthodox doctrine of miracle forms 
the transition to its complete denial by the later 
rationalists. 

Orthodoxy at this time was not the all-powerful 
hierarchy of the preceding century, but had been 
greatly weakened by the growth of pietism on 
the one hand and skepticism on the other. It 



156 Modem Religious Thought. 

was natural enough that the orthodox party- 
should lay hold of the Wolffian philosophy as the 
coming deliverer, for the two systems agreed in 
emphasizing the intellectual, as opposed to the 
emotional extremes of the pietists. We accord- 
ingly find a group of theologians who aim to 
adapt the Wolffian philosophy to the demonstra- 
tion of the main doctrines of orthodox theol- 
ogy. Even the mathematical method of proof 
was applied to the profoundest mysteries of the 
faith, as the Atonement and the doctrine of the 
Trinity. "Darjes (died 1791), of Jena, attempted 
in 1735 to prove the ' pluritas personarum in 
Deitate ex solis rationis principiis methodo mathe- 
maticorum,' but the theologians found no fewer 
than twenty-two errors in his treatise." 1 It soon 
became apparent that the orthodox alliance with 
Wolffianism was an unnatural one, for as theology 
grew more rational it became less religious. This 
conviction is very properly expressed by Cappelliar 
in his epistle against Darjes : " We will never con- 
cede that miracles can be demonstrated from the 
principles of reason alone, which no true philos- 
opher or theologian, not to say true Christian, 
ever has admitted or can admit." 2 

i Piinjer, Hist, of Phil, of Religion, p. 532. 2 Ibid. p. 532. 



Leibnitz and Wolff. 157 

Wolff's limitations are conspicuous enough,~yet 
these should not blind us to his great services to 
German philosophy and culture. His intellect is 
dry and mechanical, his style of exposition is 
methodical and redundant to a degree both weari- 
some and exasperating. We find nowhere a sugges- 
tion of the noble ideality so attractive in Leibnitz, 
nor a single original and fruitful point of view. 
Yet, largely from this very character, Wolff 
accomplished an important work in the existing 
state of German letters. Germany was beginning 
to recover from the disasters of the Thirty Years' 
War, and as the national feeling began to assert 
itself under the leadership of Frederick the Great, 
the people awoke to the consciousness that they 
had been far surpassed in philosophy and litera- 
ture by France and England. The dominant im- 
pulse of the period was to free themselves, on the 
one side, from the unfruitful speculations of the 
Aristotelian scholasticism, still largely influential 
in the universities, and on the other hand, from 
subservience to foreign, especially French, in- 
fluence in art and letters ; the positive purpose 
being to develop a genuinely enlightened and 
national type of culture. It was in these relations 
that the Wolffian philosophy was widely useful. 



158 Modern Religious Thought, 

Its clearness and apparent orthodoxy won a 
speedy victory over the scholastic philosophy of 
the theologians ; and as Wolff lectured in the 
German language, expounding the original prin- 
ciples of Leibnitz, the result was an essentially 
German school of philosophy. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE AUFKLARUNG. 

T I THE impulse mentioned above, to bring Ger- 
many abreast with modern culture, found ex- 
pression in the general movement known as the 
" Aufklarung." This movement took the form 
of a popular philosophy, much like English deism 
in spirit and purpose. The speculative subtleties 
of the schools were disregarded, a rational view 
of life was sought in harmony with the natural 
understanding of mankind, and the practical aim 
was found in the general advancement of human 
happiness. Many of the Illuminati are Wolffian 
in their type of thought, though the cumbrous 
metaphysical terminology is abandoned and the 
principles are set forth in simple and popular 
form — in elegant, often aphoristic, literary style. 
I will refer to two of the best representatives of 
this movement — Mendelssohn and Reimarus. 

It is commonly agreed that the noblest repre- 
sentative of the Aufklarung is Moses Mendelssohn 
(1728-1786). The son of a Jewish schoolmaster, 

159 



160 Modern Religious Thought. 

and in manhood remaining in the humble position 
of a bookkeeper, he was able, in spite of poverty 
and the disadvantage of his nationality, to gain 
a general knowledge of the learning of his day 
and exert a wide influence in the literary world. 
He was on terms of intimacy with Lessing, 
Lavater, and the other prominent literary men of 
the period, being universally esteemed for his 
mild and estimable personality and the noble and 
kindly spirit of his writings. He is Wolffian in 
his general principles, though he replaces the 
Wolffian form of exposition by a pleasing and 
popular style. His works are for the most part 
devoted to the discussion of the truths of natural 
religion, proving the existence of God and the 
immortality of the soul. The argument for the 
latter is developed in the "Phaedo" (1767), 
where it is held that the soul, being simple (un- 
compounded) substance, cannot cease to exist 
except by annihilation, which is inconsistent with 
the goodness of God. The argument as to the 
divine existence appears in the " Morgenstunden, 
oder Vorlesungen iiber das Dasein Gottes," pub- 
lished the year before his death (1785). We find 
here a curious example of the effect upon the 
Wolffian school of Kant's denial of the reality of 



The Aufklarung. 161 

the external world. The argument begins with 
the Ego, instead of the material world, and from 
human knowledge, reason, and will is inferred the 
existence of a being who possesses these faculties 
in perfection. The endeavor is made to give the 
discussion the nature of a mathematical demon- 
stration, but the author evidently feels, as he 
states 1 somewhat plaintively in the preface, that 
lie belongs to a bygone philosophical age, since 
the Pure Reason " des alles zermalmenden Kants " 
has appeared (1781). He expresses the hope that 
the " Business (of restoring philosophy to a posi- 
tion of general respect) may be reserved for better 
hands (than his), for the penetration of a Kant, 
who, it is to be hoped, will build up again with 
the same spirit with which he has torn down." 2 
The Practical Reason did not appear till two years 
after Mendelssohn's death (1788). 

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) was 
professor of Oriental languages in the Hamburg 
Academical Gymnasium. His best-known work 
is " On the Chief Truths of Natural Religion " 
(1754). He is an orthodox Leibnitz- Wolffian, 
finding nothing in the universe but spiritual force. 
The world plainly points to an independent first 

i Vorbericht, p. 2. 2 Ibid. p. 5. 



162 Modern Religious Thought. 

cause and testifies of his wisdom and goodness. 
He gathers from every quarter of the world 
examples of intelligent purpose in nature : " Who 
taught these animals (wild goats and chamois) to 
measure the distances with their eyes that they 
may not leap too short or too far?" 1 The pan- 
theistic atheism of Spinoza is opposed and French 
materialism is severely dealt with. " If that in- 
fatuated author (La Mattrie), after making man 
a machine, and treating him as a plant, instead of 
entitling his last book ' A Treatise on a Happy 
Life,' had called it l'homme bete, et plus que le 
bete, he would have clearly informed us of its real 
contents." 2 Reimarus lays great emphasis upon 
immortality, which is clearly evident on natural 
grounds, and paints a pleasing picture of natural 
religion, by means of which man, " like an ingen- 
ious and dutiful son, not only takes delight in his 
intellectual delights in knowledge and wisdom, 
but has the additional satisfaction to know that 
his sincere and constant application gains him the 
love of the universal Parent of mankind." 3 

This work of Reimarus shows us the tendency 
of thought in that day. Men were becoming 
deeply conscious of the intellectual difficulties 

i Chief Truths, etc., Eng. Trans. R. Wynne, 17GG, p, 244. * Ibid. p. 448. 
3 Ibid. p. 473. 



The Aufklarung. 163 

connected with a supernatural revelation. Why 
then seek to retain such a religion, for we can 
easily demonstrate as good or a better one on 
natural grounds ? While their minds were still 
unconsciously under the sway of their old beliefs, 
it seemed easy to find convincing evidence of God 
and immortality. But generations educated in 
the belief that a supernatural revelation is impos- 
sible, confronted by the evil and imperfection, of 
the world, cannot easily convince themselves of 
the boasted truths of natural religion. 

This work of Reimarus is especially remarkable 
because* of his attitude towards the miraculous. 
It appears in his dissertation on " Providence," 
and is in fact the logical development of Leibnitz's 
strict determinism, with which the miraculous is 
irreconcilable. " It is clear from experience that 
God, by the decree of creation, had providentially 
in mind the whole future of natural events, ac- 
cording to his purpose. Therein, then, lies the 
proof that he must have determined and willed 
these wisely. ... If a ruler should every instant 
change his laws and the decisions of his judges, 
and declare this or that man free from their 
sway, it would be the same as if there were no 
laws. If also God does all immediately and by 



164 Modern Religious Thought. 

miracle, he would do everything alone ; and 
wherefore has he chosen to create finite things ? 
The more miracles he performs after creation the 
more would he destroy nature again and have 
created it to no purpose. In performing miracles 
he would make it appear either that he had not 
comprehended the natural means that were possi- 
ble for his purpose, or he would be often changing 
his purpose and working against his own influence 
in the maintenance of nature." 1 

Wolff had inseparably joined miracles and 
revelation. If Reimarus denies miracles, what is 
his attitude towards revealed religion ? This is 
Di ade clear in his " Apology for the Rational Wor- 
shipers of God," to which he devoted his best 
powers for many years, but which was not pub- 
lished during his life. It was portions of this 
work which created such a commotion when pub- 
lished by Lessing, as the "Wolfenbiittel Frag- 
ments " (1774-1778). The purpose of Reimarus 
in writing the book was to " investigate thoroughly 
the faith which had caused him so many perplexi- 
ties, and see whether or no it could subsist with 
the rules of truth." It was not to be published 
till after his death, " in more enlightened times." 2 

1 Providence, Ger. Edition, 1791, p. 537. 

- Stahr, Life and Works of Lessing, II, p. 234. 



The Aufklarung. 165 

A rational man must not accept a religion merely 
because his fathers believed it. Reason must test 
religious doctrine, as even the theologians imply 
when they prove their tenets, so far as possible, 
on grounds of reason. We find here the fact so 
insisted on by Lessing, that we have no immediate 
revelation, and that a mediate and historical reve- 
lation falls under the common laws for estimating 
human evidence. And now the criteria for test- 
ing an alleged revelation, which Wolff had worked 
out so elaborately, are at length applied rigorously 
to Christianity. The judgment on the Old Testa- 
ment is not a favorable one. " There is no history 
which is so full of contradictions, or in which the 
name of God has been so frequently and shame- 
fully abused ; for all the persons who are here 
brought forward as men of God cause utter 
offense, repulsion, and aversion by their conduct, 
to a soul that loves honor and virtue. The his- 
tory consists of a tissue of utter follies, infamies, 
deceptions, and cruelties, of which selfishness and 
ambition were mainly the motives. What is said 
about supernatural inspiration, revelation, proph- 
ecy, and miracles, is mere delusion, deception, 
and abuse of the divine name." 1 The books of 

1 Piinjer, Hist, of Phil, of Religion, p. 555. 



166 Modern Religious Thought, 

the New Testament were written by Christ's 
disciples in a natural way with no original claim 
to inspiration. Christ's teaching must be distin- 
guished from the additions made to it by his 
disciples. Jesus looked for an earthly Messianic 
kingdom; but when his plan was frustrated by 
death, his followers stole his body and invented 
the story of his resurrection. In conclusion, 
revelation in general is discarded as impossible; 
and it is also superfluous, for the truths of natural 
religion are a sufficient guide and support in life, 
are known alike by all men, and should be re- 
garded as sufficient for salvation. 

Up to this point in the theological development, 
all parties, both Wolffians and Aristotelians, 
rationalists and orthodox, had agreed in identify- 
ing the Bible and Christianity. The liberals had 
attacked, and the conservatives defended the 
Scriptures in the conviction that as their inspired 
authority was established or overthrown the cause 
of religion was won or lost. The new element 
introduced by Lessing into the controversy was to 
distinguish the religion from the book. 

Lessing (1729-1780) was a man of versatile 
genius, a towering figure in the history of German 
literature. He took no part in the theological 



The Aufklarung, 167 

discussions of his time until in the closing years 
of his life, when he was already an author of 
world-wide reputation. In philosophy he favored 
Spinoza, though his Spinozism was tempered by 
an intimate acquaintance with the works of Leib- 
nitz. It seems generally true of the gifted men 
of that period that, repelled by the crude super- 
naturalism of the prevalent orthodoxy, they 
found satisfaction in the logical consistency and 
immanent unvarying law of Spinozism. In his 
student days Lessing was skeptical as to the 
current orthodoxy, yet his profound nature early 
rejected the superficial French skepticism preva- 
lent in the polite society of the time. The publi- 
cation of the " Wolfenbiittel Fragments " (1774- 
1778) aroused an extraordinarily heated discus- 
sion, in which it is assumed by all devout 
adherents of the Lessing cult that, as the cham- 
pion of the pure religion of Christ and of Luther, 
Lessing annihilated his antagonists. 1 In his little 
work on " The Christian Religion and the Reli- 
gion of Christ," Lessing sets forth the evil effects 
of metaphysical theologies and ecclesiastical 
establishments in perverting the simplicity of 
Christ's religion — which is in the main the simple 

1 Stahr, Life and Works of Lessing, II, pp. 260-263. 



168 Modern Religious Thought. 

religion of nature which we so often encounter in 
this period. Also in " The Testament of John " 
— " Little children, love one another " — Lessing 
represents the essence of religion as morality, in 
harmony with the ring parable in Nathan the 
Wise. In the " Education of the Human Race," 
supernatural revelation is represented as the 
primer of the race, bringing to men more easily 
and quickly what the unaided reason would have 
discovered in time. 

Piinjer well remarks in reference to the Gotze 
controversy : 1 "As long as the excessive over- 
estimate of the merits of Lessing in relation to 
the philosophy of religion lasts, his often more 
rough than real polemic, and the empty evasions 
by which he turns away from the main question, 
4 What religion does Lessing understand by the 
Christian religion, and to which he confesses him- 
self to belong ? ' will be too much admired in a 
one-sided way for justice to be done to his oppo- 
nent." Here is undoubtedly suggested the perti- 
nent question in the controversy, at least as 
concerns the future religious development. If 
Lessing is defending the genuine Christian reli- 
gion against its corrupters, it is incumbent upon 

1 Hist, of Phil, of Religion, p. 573, note. 



The Aufklarung. 169 

him to make very plain what this genuine Chris- 
tianity is, after its traditional theological, eccle- 
siastical, and Scriptural forms have been stripped 
off. No such fine distinctions are necessary, how- 
ever, if he merely chooses to consider Jesus as a 
representative of religion in general — under- 
standing by religion the natural religion so com- 
monly advocated in his day. He was evidently 
under the temptation, which I fear he did not 
always successfully resist, to hold the latter posi- 
tion by personal preference, assuming the former 
only as a controversialist. Augustine, Zwingli, 
and Luther agree that the Scriptures are largely 
superfluous for a man who has assimilated their 
essential content into the fiber of his spiritual life ; 
and it was easy for Lessing, as it is for his succes- 
sors in this field, to claim to stand on the high 
spiritual ground of the great leaders of the 
Church, as advocating the spirit against the letter. 
It is evident, however, that the original teachings 
of Jesus, at least in the opinion of the Church 
teachers above mentioned, did not coincide with 
the natural religion of the eighteenth century ; so 
that the free-thinker who assumes this position 
exposes himself to the reproach of intellectual 
confusion or moral dishonesty. As to Lessing's 



170 Modern Religious Thought. 

position in general, subsequent history has shown 
pretty clearly that the abandonment of churchly 
forms and Scriptural dogmas does not necessarily 
result in the universal diffusion of religion — 
the Christian or any other worthy sort. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE FAITH PHILOSOPHY AND THE 
EOMANTIC SCHOOL. 

AN interesting phenomenon in this period is 
-*--*- the protest against the extreme intellectual- 
ism of the time by the faith philosophy of Hamann 
and Jacobi. Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) 
gave utterance in confused and oracular fashion 
to many profound and suggestive ideas. The 
human understanding has led many to error, 
because it has analytically separated that which 
should be considered in inseparable relation. The 
aim of philosophy is to comprehend life, and 
life is the union of contradictory opposites. 
" Hamann will verily contemplate this coherence 
of things ; he will take as the starting-point of all 
thinking the human individual viewed as an 
original microcosm, as an immediate unity of all 
opposites." 3 Mediate knowledge results in the 
skepticism of Kant — " the great analytical chem- 
ist." We must have recourse to immediate 

iPunjer, Hist, of Phil, of Religion, p. 611. 

171 



172 Modern Religious Thought. 

knowledge, based on "belief." The action of 
" reason " upon Christianity is to divest it of all 
that is noble and characteristic, and leave nothing 
but morality, so that the system loses its true and 
sublime contents. Christianity is the religion of 
the divine incarnation, realizing the hope of the 
union with God, dimly apparent in the blind 
strivings of the heathen faiths. 

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) brings 
the " Glaubens-Philosophie " to clear and methodi- 
cal expression. He is the Scotch realist of 
German speculation, to whom Sir William Hamil- 
ton was indebted for much philosophical material. 
His deeply religious nature was aroused by the 
destructive results of the critical philosophy as 
he found it culminating in Kant, Fichte, and 
Schelling, and he found the fundamental error of 
these thinkers in a one-sided emphasis of the 
intellectual. The business of philosophy is "to 
exhibit in the most conscientious way humanity as 
it is, be it explicable or inexplicable." " Definition 
is its means, the way to its goal — its proximate, 
not its ultimate end. Its ultimate end is that 
which cannot be defined — the insoluble, the imme- 
diate, the simple." Jacobi suggests in fact the 
chief error of this whole philosophical period — 



The Faith Philosophy. 173 

the endeavor to express all life, human and divine, 
in terms of intellectual definition. The result of 
this error is most strikingly shown in the abyss 
which yawns between Kant's Pure and Practical 
Reason. We are to act practically as though the 
ideas of the practical reason, illusion from the 
theoretical standpoint, were in fact true. There 
is plainly suggested here the insufficiency of the 
intellect alone, pure reason, as the standard of 
truth; and the necessity is shown for a higher 
standpoint in which the testimony of the whole 
man — intellect, feeling, and will — shall be the 
ground of valid knowledge, and from which the 
ideas of the practical reason shall be true. Jacobi 
remarks truly enough : " With pure metaphysics 
we can never gain the advantage over the reasons 
advanced by Spinoza against the personality of 
God, free will, and final causes." His solution of 
the difficulty, however, while correct in principle 
is objectionable in statement, when he says : 
" There is no other means of safety from the 
steep heights of metaphysics than to turn our 
back upon all philosophy and throw ourselves 
headlong into the depths of faith." No such 
violent performance is called for ; the problem is 
simply to show the partial nature of the prevalent 



174 Modern Religious Thought. 

philosophical standpoint, and to vindicate the 
rights of the moral and the emotional to be con- 
sidered, as well as the intellect, in the mental 
judgment as to what is valid knowledge. 

Traditional Christianity, however, does not 
derive much benefit from the "faith philosophy." 
Knowledge of the external world — which Jacobi 
makes immediate — is the result of an intuitive 
belief which may be called miraculous. Knowl- 
edge of God is of the same character, on the 
higher spiritual plane, so that revelation through 
external physical means is superfluous. " Revering 
that alone in Christ which is in itself divine, you 
do not debase reason and morality within yourself 
by idolatry. What Christ was outside of you, in 
himself, is a matter of indifference. What he is 
in you, this alone is important ; and in you he is a 
truly divine being ; through him you behold the 
deity, in that with him you ascend to the loftiest 
ideas." 1 

The limits of this work will allow but a word 
of reference to Goethe and the Romantic School, 
who are important for our subject, if only because 
of their early influence upon Schleiermacher. 
Rousseau's religion of sentiment was developed in 

1 Von den Gottlichen Diagen, Werke, vol. iii, p. 286. 



The Faith Philosophy. 175 

opposition to the extremes of French materialism, 
which destroyed all that was ideal and morally 
worthy; and the same general movement is 
observable throughout Europe. This school also 
represents the farthest swing of the pendulum in 
reaction from the asceticism of the Middle Ages 
— a fact it may be well for a prosaic person to 
bear in mind when he encounters the evidence, 
which is plentiful enough, of the easy morals of 
these disciples of feeling. The school was also 
affected by the reaction against the extremes of 
intellectualism which appears in Hamann and 
Jacobi; the one-sided emphasis of reason in 
Germany had been little less destructive in its 
outcome than the materialism of France. There 
appeared, therefore, a somewhat general tendency 
of thought to seek the highest truth, not in the 
cold calculations of ceason, but in the impulses of 
immediate feeling and the happy inspirations of 
genius. These various influences, in an age and 
country unusually prolific of poetic and passionate 
youth, produced a group of thinkers and writers 
who found the ideal character in the man who 
defied the traditional, the conventional, the 
" reasonable " — holding a man to be a genius in 
proportion as he was the creature of the momen- 



176 Modern Religious Thought, 

tary impulse. Goethe seems largely to have out- 
grown these romantic vagaries, and to have 
developed a Spinozistic type of religious belief, 
vitalized and ennobled by his poetic sensibility. 
The Schlegels represent an unworthy extreme of 
this tendency. " In the wretched novel Lucinde, 
Friedrich Schlegel, the most impudent of these 
characters, erected to himself a fitting monu- 
ment." 1 In this novel the deification of the 
natural as opposed to the artificial restraints of 
custom, heredity, and ascetic morality is carried 
to such a length that the author says of his inter- 
views with his mistress : " Wir umarmen uns mit 
eben so viel Ausgelassenheit als Religion." This 
expression is significant, as suggesting the doc- 
trine of Schleiermacher's "Discourses on Reli- 
gion," that all normal feeling is religious. Fried- 
rich Schlegel was Schleiermacher's room-mate in 
Berlin about the time the Discourses were written, 
and it was he who urged upon Schleiermacher the 
project of composing them. 

1 Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, vol. i, p. 263. 



CHAPTER V. 

EMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804). 

TN Kant's principal critical work, the " Critique 
■*- of Pure Reason " (1781), the problem dis- 
cussed is, how are synthetic judgments a priori 
possible ? An analytic judgment merely asserts of 
a subject something involved in the concept of the 
subject — as, Man is a vertebrate. A synthetic 
judgment makes a positive addition to knowledge 
concerning the subject — as, Man is immortal. A 
priori means apart from experience, on grounds of 
reason rather than of empirical fact. The answer 
to the question, How are synthetic judgments a 
priori possible ? fs negative ; mental activities 
which are synthetic — enlarge the bounds of 
knowledge — are trustworthy only when regulated 
by experience. These principles determine, evi- 
dently enough, the question as to whether the 
speculative reason can demonstrate the existence 
of God, as was held by the popular theology and 
philosophy of the time. It is only possible to use 
the pure reason in proving God's existence if the 

177 



178 Modern Religious Thought. 

proposition, God exists, can be shown to be an 
analytic proposition. This is the assumption of 
the ontological argument, which is discussed pp. 
476-483 1 — the assumption being that the con- 
cept of God, as the most real or perfect being, 
includes his necessary objective existence. Kant 
replies that if it is assumed (which is the ques- 
tion at issue) that the concept of God includes 
objective existence, then of course the proposition, 
God exists, is objectively valid and "you have 
apparently won the game — but in fact have said 
nothing; for you have stated an empty tautol- 
ogy." 2 " Every reasonable person must admit 
that every proposition asserting existence is syn- 
thetic ; " 3 very true, for the mental concept of a 
centaur does not guarantee that a centaur actually 
exists in nature. The cosmological and physico- 
teleological arguments are no more satisfactory. 
"Should the empirically valid law of causality 
lead to the original being, this being must belong, 
with the rest, in the chain of the objects of expe- 
rience ; but in that case it would itself be again 
conditioned, as are all phenomena." 4 The result 
of the Critique of Pure Reason is that the transcen- 
dental ideas of pure reason ■ — the soul, the world, 

i Kirchman's Edition, 1868. 2 Ibid. p. 479. 3 ibid. p. 480. * Ibid. p. 507. 



Immanuel Kant, 179 

and God — can be held only as regulative, not as 
constitutive principles. We must not assume a 
higher sort of knowledge based on reason as 
superior to experience, and from this supposed 
higher standpoint construct the world of real 
things by deductive reasoning ; we should rather 
study the given facts of experience, in humble 
consciousness of the limitations of our powers, 
and employ the ideas of pure reason merely to 
give theoretical unity to our thought. The result 
is in accord with the inductive tendency of 
modern times. Kant called himself the Coperni- 
cus of philosophy, teaching men that their mental 
world was not the center of the universe, but was 
only a part of a mighty system which must be 
studied as it really is, if we would know a valid 
truth. 

If the outcome of the Pure Reason is not flatter- 
ing to human vanity, the worth of human nature 
finds a higher estimate in the Practical Reason 
(1788). Freedom of will, untenable from the 
standpoint of pure reason, is here assumed as the 
condition of fulfilling the moral law, to which all 
are consciously obligated. Hence God must be 
assumed as the law-giver and judge, and immor- 
tality as affording a future state where the 



180 Modern Religious Thought. 

inequalities of the present life may be readjusted 
according to individual desert. These three ideas 
of the practical reason are assumed not on theo- 
retical but moral grounds — because they satisfy 
" a legitimate need to assume something without 
which that cannot be realized which man feels 
himself unavoidably obligated to regard as the 
object of his activity." 1 The fundamental law of 
the Practical Reason is : " So act that the maxim 
of your will at every moment could at the same 
time serve as the principle of a general moral 
law." 2 Kant is most rigorous in demanding 
obedience to the moral law. Expediency must 
never be considered, whether self-interest or the 
interest of others, when conflicting with the cate- 
gorical imperative. The law of truth must be 
observed even when dealing with villains who 
intend robbery and murder. Religion "is the 
recognition of all duties as divine commands." 3 
These are in brief the principles of Kant's 
" epoch - making " philosophy. If accepted, 
whether in philosophy or in theology, the effect 
is revolutionary. " Kant cut away the base from 
both the supernaturalists and the rationalists ; for 
what the former claimed to know from the Bible, 

1 Pract. Vernunft, Kirchman, p. 3. * Ibid. p. 36. » Ibid. p. 155. 



Immanuel Kant. 181 

m 
and the latter from reason, could not be known 

by any means." * 

It is commonly held that the Pure Reason, which 
gives us only knowledge of appearances, issues in 
skepticism, and that the Practical Reason, with its 
ideas which are confessedly not valid as knowl- 
edge, issues in illusion. Kant would probably 
deny both inferences, holding the theoretical 
knowledge to be real, and that we have a moral 
certainty as to the practical ideas which furnishes 
a sufficient guide and support in conduct. The 
result of his procedure, however, is to discredit 
still more the practical ideas, — at least of God 
and immortality, — for he develops a religious 
system which is simple morality. As the ration- 
alist said that a revealed religion was unnecessary, 
for he could demonstrate a better one on grounds 
of reason, so Kant now says that both revealed 
and natural religion are unnecessary, for morality 
is sufficient. Kant may have felt that if morality 
was to fill satisfactorily the large place previously 
occupied in human life by religion, there ought to 
be a good deal of it ; at all events, his ethical 
system is almost unequaled in the history of 
thought for the severity of its principles. This 

1 Russell, Lectures on " The Ground of Christian Faith." 



182 Modern Religious Thought. 

m 
tendency to the apotheosis of morality found its 

consummation in Fichte, to whom God was merely 
the objectivized moral law. Since the world has, 
as the result of these speculations, become accus- 
tomed to dispense with religion, the idea has 
naturally enough occurred to many that less 
morality and a milder type of it would answer 
every necessary purpose. 

Kant's philosophy of religion is set forth in his 
" Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason " 
(1792). The keynote of the work is sounded 
in the opening sentence of the introduction of the 
first edition in 1793. " Morality, so far as it is 
grounded upon the concept of man as a free 
being, free, but just on that account subjecting 
himself by his reason to unconditional laws, needs 
neither the idea of another being over him in 
order that he may know his duty, nor does 
morality need a motive, other than that of the 
law itself, in order that man may observe it. . . . 
Morality does not consequently need religion at 
all, but by means of the practical reason is suffi- 
cient for itself." 

The first section of the book expounds Kant's 
doctrine of original sin. He proceeds to show, iii 
what seems at first sight a very orthodox fashion, 



Immanuel Kant. 183 

that " man is by nature evil." It soon appears, 
however, that Kant's original sin deviates widely 
from the traditional church dogma — a fact which 
is true of practically all the religious doctrines as 
Kant discusses them. "If we say, man is by 
nature good, or he is by nature evil, this means 
only that he contains a first ground (beyond the 
reach of our investigation) of the assumption of 
good or evil maxims ; and this is true of him in 
general as man, so that in this fact he gives ex- 
pression to the character of his race." 1 Kant's 
doctrine of original sin is rather nebulous, as evil 
is in some sense innate, and yet the individual is 
responsible for it. His interest in the matter, 
however, is evidently to show that man is always 
the responsible subject of the moral law ; although 
he has a natural tendency to evil he cannot weakly 
excuse his immoral conduct on this ground, but 
always has a clearly marked moral character for 
which he is responsible. He refutes the doctrine 
of the " IndifTerents," that man is partly good and 
partly evil ; a man's character is never morally 
indifferent, for if he has chosen the moral law as 
the maxim of his conduct, he is good, and if he 
has not, he is evil. 2 

1 Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason, p. 21. 2 pp. 23, 25. 



184 Modern Religious Thought. 

How is it possible for a bad man to become 
good? This must be possible, for the moral law 
commands it. " If he changes the highest ground 
of his maxim by a single invincible resolution, he 
is so far, as respects principle and purpose, a sub- 
ject receptive for the good ; but is a good man 
only as he continues to work and develop. This 
is for him who beholds the heart — God — the 
same as to be actually a good man." 1 Here is 
Kant's doctrine of justification. 

The doctrine of justification is discussed at 
length in the second section of the work. It is 
represented that we are saved " through faith in 
the Son of God " ; but the terms here again have 
a new meaning — or rather essentially the old 
meaning we have encountered in the natural 
religion of the Aufklarung. " That which alone 
can make a world the object of a divine decree 
and the end of creation is humanity (the rational 
creation in general) in its moral perfection. This 
man, alone well-pleasing to God, 'is in him from 
eternity ' ; the idea of the same proceeds from His 
essence ; he is in so far no created thing, but his 
only begotten Son ; ' the Word (the Becoming !) 
through which all things are made.' " 2 The " Son 

1 Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason, p. 54. 2 p. 68. 









Immanuel Kant. 185 

of God " is therefore simply the ideal of a morally 
perfect humanity — here apparently identified 
with Jesus. Saving "faith," in Kant's system, is 
not the belief that Jesus " bare our sins in his 
own body on the tree," but rather the conviction 
that, had we been crucified on Calvary, we would 
have borne the shame and suffering as patiently 
and triumphantly as Jesus did. " In practical 
faith in the Son of God a man may hope to be- 
come well pleasing to God ; that is, he who is 
conscious that he can believe and confidently 
trust that under like temptations and sufferings 
he would himself remain invincibly faithful to 
the ideal of humanity and imitate Christ's exam- 
ple in true devotion — such a man, and he alone, 
is warranted to regard himself as a not unworthy 
object of the divine favor." * It is to be feared 
that Luther would have found here a strong flavor 
of the Romish doctrine of salvation by works. 

The supernatural occurrences recorded in the 
Scriptures, as Adam's fall and the incarnation, are 
to be interpreted in an ideal, spiritual sense. 
" The attempt to find in Scripture that sense 
which is in harmony with the holiest that the 
reason teaches must be regarded not only as per- 

1 Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason, p. 69. 



186 Modern Religious Thought. 

missible but rather as a duty." 1 " The moral 
philosophers among the Greeks and Romans did 
the same with their mythological doctrines of the 
gods." 2 For a truly moral religion miracles are 
superfluous ; " for it betrays a punishable grade of 
moral unbelief if one does not regard the man- 
dates of duty, as they were originally written by 
reason in the heart of man, of sufficient author- 
ity, unless they are substantiated by miracles; 
4 except ye see signs and wonders ye will not 
believe.' " 3 Here again we observe the close rela- 
tionship of Kant's religion of morality to the 
natural religion of the time ; " the mandates of 
duty were originally written by reason in the 
heart." This passage also reminds one of Lessing, 
with his fiery invective against Pastor Gotze, who 
clung to the letter and would not believe, except 
he saw signs and wonders. Kant follows the 
example of the preceding rationalists also in 
showing first that miracles are superfluous, and 
then that they are impossible. The ground of 
the denial of miracles is the scientific assumption 
of the uniformity of nature. " Miracles must be 
assumed as occurring daily or never ; and in the 
last case we must not employ them as grounds of 

1 Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason, p. 98. 2 p. 131. s p. 98. 



Immanuel Kant. 187 

explanation or as rules of conduct ; and as the 
first assumption is contrary to reason, it remains 
only to assume the last maxim." 1 

Kant discourses in an edifying way of the 
Kingdom of God and the Church. The servants 
of the moral law constitute a " people of God." 2 
" The true (visible) Church is that which repre- 
sents the (moral) kingdom of God on earth so 
far as this is possible through men." 3 On page 
121 we have a pleasing figure of the Church life 
— but one which suggests again the reason religion 
of Reimarus. "The Church could best be com- 
pared to a household, under a common though 
invisible Father, in so far as his holy Son, who 
knows his will and also stands in blood relationship 
to all its members, occupies the place of the 
Father in the family, so that he makes the Father's 
will more distinctly known to the members, and 
therefore they honor the Father in the Son, and 
so enter among themselves into a voluntary, uni- 
versal, and permanent union." The kingdom will' 
come when men cease to hope for forgiveness of 
sins and moral perfection through the magical 
influence of some supernatural Saviour, and pro- 
ceed resolutely to work out their own salvation 

1 Religion, etc., p. 104, note. 2 p. 117. * p. 119. 



188 Modem Religious Thought. 

according to the principles of the religion of 
reason. The Church faith is to be gradually 
transformed into this rational religion. " Religion 
will be gradually freed from all empirical motives, 
from all statutes which rest upon history, and 
which, by means of a churchly belief, have pro- 
visionally united men for the furtherance of the 
good ; and so the pure religion of reason will at 
last rule over all, * that God may be all in all.' " 1 
There is no place in Kant's Church for prayer 
and the orthodox means of grace. " Prayer, as 
an inner, formal service of God, and therefore 
conceived as a means of grace, is superstitious 
illusion (fetishism) ; for it is merely a wish, 
expressed to a being who knows our thoughts, 
through which nothing is accomplished and con- 
sequently none of the duties are discharged 
which rest upon us as divine commands." 2 An 
earnest wish to be well-pleasing to God is the 
" spirit of prayer " ; but its verbal expression is 
of little value, and all do not feel the need of it. 
Prayer is properly communing with one's self 
instead of with God, and can at best result in 
the resolute purpose to be faithful to moral duty ; 
which is the only worthy consideration involved. 

1 Religion, etc., p. 144. - p. 234. 



Immanuel Kant. 189 

With Kant, prayer may not be " the brave man's 
hope," but it is certainly not "the coward's 
excuse." The orthodox sacraments are of doubt- 
ful value for the same reason ; we are in danger 
of slackening the intensity of our own moral 
resolution if we place any reliance on means of 
grace which are more or less magical in their 
nature. 



CHAPTER VI. 

HEGEL (1770-1831). 

T PASS now to consider Hegel's philosophy of 
*- religion. The religious philosophies of Kant, 
Hegel, and Schleiermacher are of essential im- 
portance for the succeeding theological develop- 
ment. 

DOCTRINE OF GOD. 

Hegel's God is Aristotle's Prime Mover (who is 
pure thought, thought of himself as thought) sup- 
plemented by the Christian scholastic conception 
that the divine thought instantly realizes itself in 
concrete being. In this last conception is to be 
found the basis for Hegel's identification of thought 
and being — so confusing to the average student. 
In discussing the " Absolute Idea " (his term for 
God), Hegel says : " The idea as unity of the sub- 
jective and objective idea is the concept of the idea, 
to which the idea as such is object ; an object in 
which all distinctions have disappeared. This unity 
is therefore the absolute and complete truth, the 
idea thinking itself, and here (thinking itself) as 

190 



Hegel. 191 

thinking, as logical idea. ... It is the v6^m<$ voyjaews 
(thought of thought), which Aristotle has already 
designated as the highest form of the Idea." 1 The 
content of the Absolute Idea, the thought about 
which God thinks, is his own inner thought life. 
Since the divine thought instantly realizes itself 
in created existences, the necessary and eternal 
order of the divine thought is the necessary order 
of the development of being in the world. Logic 
then, the law of the development of thought, will 
also be the law of the development of reality. 
" The content (of the Absolute Idea) is the sys- 
tem of the logical. . . . The true content is 
nothing else than the whole system, the develop- 
ment of which we have hitherto considered." 2 
This is in general Hegel's philosophical method ; 
find the logical law of thought, and this must be 
the law of the development in reality. Hegel 
attempts to verify the principle by applying it to 
history, religion, philosophy, etc. ; and with a 
considerable degree of success, though the facts 
are at times distorted to fit the theory. "Reason 
rules the world, consequently the history of the 
world is rational." 3 "The substance, the essence 

1 Volstandige Ausgabe, Berlin, 1840, Encyclopadie, p. 408. 

2 Ency. p. 409. » Phil, der Geschichte, p. 12. 



192 Modem Religious Thought. 

of spirit, is freedom " Y — consciousness of one's 
self as free, over against the world and everything 
without. Therefore in the development of his- 
tory we find first the Oriental nations, " who do 
not know that man, in himself, is free ; but know 
only that one is free " 2 — the despot. The second 
stage appears with the Greeks and Romans, who 
knew "that some men are free." Finally, u the 
Germanic nations, in Christianity, came to the 
consciousness that man, as man, is free ; that the 
freedom of the spirit constitutes his essential 
nature." In the field of religion we find (1) the 
religions of nature, witchcraft, etc., where man is 
the superstitious slave of nature ; (2) Religions 
of Spiritual Individuality — Hebrew, Greek, 
Roman ; (3) Christianity, the Absolute Religion, 
of truth and freedom. 3 The same law appears in 
the movement of philosophical thought : " The 
work of the modern age is to grasp the idea as 
spirit — as the idea knowing itself." 4 

As the normal movement of thought, whether 
human or divine, is assumed to be everywhere the 
same, the development of the thought-life of man 
will give in general the mode of operation of the 

i Phil, der Geschichte, p. 22. 2 Ibid. p. 23. » Phil, of Religion. 
4 Phil, der Geschichte, p. 620, vol. iii. 



Hegel 193 

divine mind, and so the order of creation and 
history. The unfolding mind of the child comes 
to consciousness of itself in relation to an exter- 
nal world ; goes out of itself, knows objects, and 
then, distinguishing these from itself, turns back 
into itself in self-consciousness. God's relation 
to the world is essentially the same in Hegel's 
view. God's thought, going out of itself, is real- 
ized in the creation of the world ; knowing the 
world, he turns back into himself in self-con- 
sciousness. The old theologians would object 
that this doctrine makes God dependent upon the 
world. Hegel, however, though he speaks of God 
" before the creation " (as Father), held the crea- 
tion to be timeless, and God's relation to the 
world to be eternal. 1 Hegel finds here the essen- 
tial significance of the Christian Trinity. God, 
before creation, at peace in himself, "in the 
motionless tranquillity of the thinking spirit," 2 is 
the Father ; going out in thought which actualizes 
itself in the world, he is the Son ; knowing him- 
self in the Son, and returning in love, reconciled, 
into himself, he is the Spirit. We have here a 
typical illustration of the bewildering admix- 
ture of psychology, philosophy, and rationalized 

i Phil, of Religion, ii, p. 181. 2 Ibid. p. 180. 



194 Modern Religious Thought. 

theology which constitutes Hegel's Philosophy of 
Religion. Many of the philosophical elements 
are profoundly suggestive and possibly true ; many 
of the theological elements are true, in some 
sense, from the traditional Christian standpoint, 
though Hegel gives them a new meaning without 
explaining or justifying the change ; and the 
result is confidently proclaimed as the final recon- 
ciliation of philosophy and theology. The his- 
torical outcome was as might be expected, in 
relation to such a system of specious half-truths. 
It is impossible to preach it to the people as Chris- 
tianity, without endless confusion of thought and 
a growing perception that its principles are de- 
structive of the historic faith ; and it is almost 
equally impossible to refute it thoroughly, be- 
cause of the (at least apparent) Christian truth 
which is so skillfully woven into it. We are 
often reminded in Hegel of Kant's remark that a 
sense must be found in Scripture which will har- 
monize with reason ; so that we may expect to 
find Hegel, even as Kant and Lessing, sternly 
rebuking the theologians who hold to the letter of 
the traditional dogma, the true spirit of which 
the philosopher is sent to reveal. 

Hegel treats the Philosophy of Religion in three 



Hegel, 195 

parts: (1) The Concept (Begriff) of Religion; 
(2) The Positive Religions; (3) The Absolute 
Religion (Christianity). 

"Religion, according to its universal concept, 
is the consciousness of the Absolute Being." 1 
"In Christianity the universal and the individual 
spirit, the infinite and the finite, are inseparable — 
this religion is their absolute identity, and has 
this for its content." 2 From the intellectual 
character of Hegel's system religion must lie for 
him predominately in the sphere of thought — in 
" denkendes Gottesbewustsein " 3 ; " but it is a 
thought," Zeller continues, " not in the form of 
thought, but of feeling and sensuous understand- 
ing. It is thought, for only by his thinking does 
man elevate himself above the brutes, and the 
deity can reveal himself only to the thinking 
spirit." Hegel does not make very clear what he 
conceives to be the exact relation of these differ- 
ent elements in religion ; but as the content of 
philosophy and religion is said to be the same, 
though religion has the lower form of feeling and 
sensuous understanding, the plain inference is 
that religion must ultimately lose this distinctive 



1 Phil, of Religion, ii, p. 152. 2 Ibid, ii, p. 153. 
3 Zeller, Geschichte der Deutschen Phil., p. 667. 



196 Modern Religious Thought, 

form, and philosophy will rule alone. In his 
polemic against religion as feeling, Hegel came 
into conflict with Schleiermacher, who was a 
fellow professor at Berlin. Hegel finds the 
ground of the Church's unity in its intellectual 
doctrines, as opposed to the view Schleiermacher 
so insists upon in the " Discourses," that the igno- 
rant are often the most devout. " Religion may 
take refuge, as in clear thought, so also in sensa- 
tion, in feeling, — may limit itself to this, so that 
it gives up the truth, renounces any content of 
knowledge ; and consequently the Holy Church 
no more has any unity, but dissolves into atoms. 
For the unity is in the doctrine, but every 
individual has his own feeling, his peculiar 
sensations." 1 

In his Philosophy of Religion we find the 
familiar theological terms — revelation, miracle, 
witness of the Spirit, good and evil, redemption, 
etc. ; but the things signified by these old terms 
have undergone a transformation extremely puz- 
zling to the common sense thinker. 

What is revelation ? " Religion is the spirit's 
knowledge of itself as spirit." 2 " Spirit is this — 
to manifest itself. What reveals God, except that 

i Phil, of Religion, ii, p. 286. 2 Ibid. p. 156. 



Hegel. 197 

he is this revelation of himself! . . . What is 
revealed is that he exists for the other " (in 
relation with the sphere of the other, the world). 
" This is the definition of revelation." 1 Knowl- 
edge of one's self, in one's highest (spiritual) 
nature, is knowledge of God. By many external 
influences — physical, historical, etc. — we may be 
led to the truth that the world is the kingdom of 
the Son, the sphere of otherness over against God ; 
that God is in it and is it, so that nature is a veil 
which reveals rather than conceals God. This 
idea may be presented in a poetically pious form 
which sounds eminently edifying and Christian ; 
and indeed it does suggest an important Christian 
truth. In essence, however, it is simply the 
pantheistic doctrine that when a man knows him- 
self and the world he knows God. 

Hegel does not explicitly deny miracles, but 
ignores them as not furnishing convincing evi- 
dence as to spiritual truth. " The chief stand- 
point of the reason in reference to the miracles is, 
that the spiritual cannot be proven by external 
means ; for the spiritual is higher than the exter- 
nal and can be proven only through itself and in 
itself. This is what is called the witness of the 

iPhil. of Eeligion, p. 158. 



198 Modern Religious Thought, 

Spirit. . . . Christ himself rejects the miracles as 
a true criterion of the truth." 1 

What is the " witness of the Spirit " to which 
the pious teacher directs us when we foolishly 
clamor for signs and wonders? "This may be 
manifold. In history the noble, moral, divine, 
speaks to us, and our spirit gives witness to it. 
It may also be connected with insight, thought. 
. . . The witness of the Spirit in its highest 
manifestation is the method of philosophy, that 
the concept, purely as such without presupposi- 
tion, develops the truth from itself." 2 The 
Scriptural doctrine of the witness of the divine 
Spirit is here unostentatiously transformed into 
the response of the human spirit to what appeals 
to it as true. Of course the highest form of the 
witness appears in connection with philosophy; 
that is, if the Hegelian system appeals to a man 
as the final and perfect summation of truth, he is 
divinely called to philosophy and to salvation. 

Hegel treats of the Absolute Religion — Chris- 
tianity — under three heads. (1) The kingdom of 
the Father, in his eternal idea ; (2) the kingdom 
of the Son, in the form of consciousness and 
sensuous understanding, or the Difference ; (3) 

i Phil, of Religion, ii, p. 161. 2 Ibid. pp. 161, 162. 



Hegel 199 

the kingdom of the Spirit, in the form of the 
Church. These three are related, as I have stated 
above : (1) is God in the repose of his eternal 
being ; (2) is God, as the Word, going out to 
create the world and knowing himself in it ; and 
(3) is the return into himself, reconciled in love. 
When Hegel speaks of the "Kingdom of the 
Son," it must not be supposed he means the king- 
dom of the historic person Jesus, although he 
seems willing enough to give this impression. 
Hegel's kingdom of the Son is the universe con- 
sidered as created and set over against God. 
There is a point of contact here with orthodox 
doctrine, in that the world is held to have been 
created by the preexistent Logos ; we find again 
in Hegel, however, the extreme Greek Neo-Pla- 
tonic form of this theory which we studied in 
Origen. Hegel has it in common with the Greek 
metaphysical theologians of the early Christian 
centuries, that the human and historical Jesus is 
largely lost sight of in mazy speculations as to 
the Logos in relation to creation and the ultimate 
principles of the universe. The sphere of the other, 
the world of sense, is in a way separated from 
God, and in this separation lies the possibility 
of evil and the consequent need of redemption. 



200 Modern Religious Thought, 

Evil is simply estrangement from God, and 
redemption is the restoration of the consciousness 
of union with God. Therefore in discussing the 
sphere of the other, "the kingdom of the Son," 
Hegel treats of what corresponds in his system to 
the Christian doctrines of sin and redemption. 

He discusses here the end and destiny of man. 
We find first the opposed propositions, much as in 
Kant — man is by nature good, and man is by 
nature evil. Man is by nature good in the sense 
that he is good in possibility, has the natural 
endowments which, properly used, will bring him 
to the knowledge of God and union with him. 
This is a state of innocence like Adam in Paradise ; 
the goodness must become actual in knowledge of 
God and union with him. Man, on the other 
hand, may be said to be by nature evil, in so far as 
the natural state, good merely in possibility, falls 
so far short of the realized good ; he is also evil 
in a more positive sense when he voluntarily 
remains content in this state of separation from 
God — when " his will is filled with the content 
of individuality ; that is, the natural man is 
selfish." 1 The moral development of man con- 
sists in passing out of the state of innocence, 

i Phil, of Religion, ii, p. 212. 



Hegel. 201 

where he knows no evil and consequently has 
no confirmed character, into consciousness of 
ignorance of and separation from God ; here 
ensues a state of moral conflict in which the 
man learns to know God as at one with him, 
and so returns into himself with developed 
knowledge and strength of character This 
process is Hegel's process of " redemption." It is 
in essence the old truism that character can be 
developed only in conflict with ignorance and 
temptation. It resembles the traditional Christian 
doctrine of redemption about as much as Hegel's 
Trinity accords with the orthodox dogma. 

What is the nature of this state of separation 
(" Entzweiung "), Hegel's evil ? Is it a real separa- 
tion, in will and moral purpose, in which the finite 
spirit defies the will and power of God? If so, 
the human spirit has a real power of self-direction 
— has a proper personality apart from the abso- 
lute ; and Hegel's system is not pantheistic. But 
no, this is not Hegel's view ; " he knows nothing 
of evil as that which ought not to be but is, as 
the result of man's moral choice. Freedom, with 
Hegel, is only the freedom involved in the whole 
process of becoming what one becomes." x As 

1 Russell, Content of Faith. 



202 Modem Religious Thought. 

God passes out of himself in creation and then 
returns into himself in self-knowledge and love, so 
man passes from the imperfection of moral inno- 
cence into the state of separation and then back 
into himself with developed knowledge and char- 
acter. Both processes are necessary, and the 
sphere of the other, the separateness, is an indis- 
pensable element in the movement ; so that 
Hegel's evil plainly does not possess the quality 
which constitutes the sinfulness of sin. " In itself 
this evil existence is not something foreign to 
God. . . . The evil is the same as the good." 1 
Both evil and good are necessary elements in the 
eternal process of development. 

" There are two stages of the wishes of men ; 
the one is, to live in undisturbed happiness, in 
harmony with himself and outer nature, and the 
beast remains in this unity, but man has passed 
beyond it ; the other wish is the desire for eternal 
life/' 2 Therefore the physical world can no more 
afford satisfaction to the spirit, struggling upward 
from a state of nature. " This state of contradic- 
tion has in general two forms ; (1) the opposition 
of the evil, as such, that the man himself is evil — 

1 Phanomenologie des Geistes, pp. 584, 585. 

2 Phil, of Religion, ii, p. 218. 



Hegel 208 

this is the opposition in relation to God; (2) 
the opposition in relation to the world, that he 
is out of harmony with the world — this is 
unhappiness." 1 Can a man, by his own efforts, 
escape from this state of moral conflict and attain 
to redemption ? Kant has said Yes ; Hegel says 
No, apparently with Paul and Luther. " That the 
opposition in itself is removed, forms the condi- 
tion, the presupposition, the possibility, that the 
subject can remove it as related to himself. , ' 2 
The separating influence of evil is overcome by 
the consciousness of union with God ; if this 
union did not exist in fact, man could not bring it 
about ; therefore man cannot redeem or save him- 
self. All that man can do is to pass by spiritual 
development from the stage where he mistakenly 
regards himself as in opposition to God into the 
higher state where he knows that he is and always 
has been in essential unity with God. There is 
in the redemptive process no change of sentiment 
or relation on the part of God toward the finite 
subject, such as is supposed in the orthodox doc- 
trine of justification ; that there is any such 
change is an illusion of human ignorance. " The 
state of separation, the finiteness, the weakness, 

1 Phil, of Religion, ii, p. 221. 2 Ibid. p. 228. 



204 Modem Religious Thought. 

the frailty of human nature cannot destroy that 
unity which is the essential element of redemp- 
tion ; " 1 just as the world, as the sphere of other- 
ness over against God, is at the same time the 
Son of God and consequently "has in itself the 
fullness of the divine nature." 

We find in Hegel's doctrine of redemption a 
union of truisms and trivialities and profound and 
suggestive reflections, set forth in a style whose 
obscurity is baffling and whose lofty pretensions 
are misleading — characteristic qualities of Hegel's 
work which have made his system the philosophi- 
cal enigma of modern times. 

What is the relation of redemption to the 
historic person, Jesus? It is evident that from 
Hegel's philosophical standpoint an historical 
incarnation is unnecessary ; the revelation of 
God as the Logos, in creation, in the development 
of history, and in the human soul, is a sufficient 
revelation for the man who has attained to the 
full possession of his powers of thought. But on 
the lower stages of human progress, the incarna- 
tion, a visible object lesson of the unity of the 
divine and the human, may be useful — possibly 
necessary — as a temporary aid for humanity in its 

1 Phil, of Religion, ii, p. 231. 



Hegel. 205 

struggles upward ; much as Lessing makes revela- 
tion the primer of the race. 

What was the essence of the unique relation in 
which Christ stood to God ? Was he one with God, 
metaphysically, in a sense true of no other human 
being, or did he merely possess a perfect conscious- 
ness of the essential unity of the divine and human 
which is true in relation to every man? The 
latter is the usual interpretation, and plainly har- 
monizes with the general spirit of Hegel's system. 

What is the significance of Christ's death ? It 
is not sacrificial, as producing any change in God's 
relation to the sinner. It is merely a manifesta- 
tion, in the most extreme form, of God's love, his 
essential unity with humanity. "Death is the 
highest proof of humanity, of absolute finiteness ; 
and Christ has died the painful death of the 
transgressor; humanity has been manifested in 
him to the farthest possible point." 1 In that 
Christ rose from the dead, God appeared as the 
" death of death " ; he showed that he was Lord 
of death, supreme in the sphere of the "other- 
ness." 

" The explanation of redemption is that God is 
reconciled with the world, or has shown himself 

i Phil, of Religion, ii, p. 249. 



206 Modern Religious Thought. 

to have been reconciled with the world, that the 
human is not foreign to him, but that this sphere 
of the other, finiteness, is a stage of development 
in himself, but of course a transient one." 1 In 
the universe redemption is an eternal process; 
otherness, evil, is constantly emerging, and as con- 
stantly being annulled in the higher unity of the 
good. This eternal law is illustrated in pictorial 
form, in the history of Jesus. He presents the 
eternal truth of the unity of God and man in a 
form comprehensible to common, unphilosophical 
humanity. 

We saw above 2 that, in the view of Hegel, 
Spirit is "the idea turning back upon itself and 
beholding itself as soul, as society, and as God." 
One needs to have in mind this Hegelian concep- 
tion of spirit, rather than the ordinary Christian 
doctrine of the Holy Spirit, as he approaches the 
study of Hegel's "kingdom of the Spirit" — the 
Church. Christ did not rise from the dead in 
bodily form — he "arose in the spirit of the 
Christian community." 3 The Christian commu- 
nity became somehow convinced, as the result of 
Christ's life and teachings, of the essential unity 
of God and man. "The consciousness of the 

1 Phil, of Religion, ii, p. 254. 2 p. 128 sup. 

3 Zeller, Geschichte der Deutschen Phil., p. 671. 



Hegel 207 

church of certainty as to the union of the divine 
nature and the human, this it is with which the 
Church begins, and this constitutes the truth on 
which the Church is built." 1 Hegel's treatment 
of the subject in the Philosophy of Religion is 
extremely vague, but the gist of it evidently is 
that the Christian community is conscious of 
union with God and of its mission to proclaim 
this truth to others, and therefore the Church is 
"spirit" in the Hegelian sense — as the idea in 
the form of self-consciousness. This " spirit " has 
no relation to the historic Jesus, no relation to an 
assumed third person of the divine Trinity — at 
least in the sense of traditional orthodoxy; it is 
rather to be compared to the esprit de corps of a 
social club or an army. 

What of immortality? Hegel says it is a 
"principal element of religion that the soul is 
immortal; as object of the interest of God it 
is elevated above the finite." 2 This immortality is 
a " present quality, the spirit is eternal, in its free- 
dom is not in the sphere of the limited." 3 The 
ambiguity of the Hegelian doctrine of immortality 
is cleared up somewhat in an interesting little 
fragment in the posthumous works of Professor 

* Phil, of Religion, ii, p. 254. 2 j bi(i . p. 219 , 3 1^3. ? . 2 20, 



208 Modern Religious Thought, 

T. H. Green, perhaps the most conspicuous repre- 
sentative of Hegelianism in England. "The 
immortality of the soul, as = the eternity of 
thought = the being of God, is the absolute first 
and the absolute whole. As a determination of 
thought, every thing is eternal. What are we to 
say then to the extinct races of animals, the past 
formations of the earth? They are eternal, as 
stages in an eternal process. Relatively to our 
temporal consciousness, they have perished ; rela- 
tively to the thought, which, as eternal, holds 
past, present, and future together, they are perma- 
nent; their very transitoriness is eternal. The 
living agent, man, like everything else, is eternal 
as a determination of thought." 1 And so the 
Christian doctrine of personal immortality becomes 
the pale abstraction that the life of man is a 
transient incident in universal history, but known 
forever in the thought of God. When we inquire 
if we shall know God in a future life, we are told 
we shall be known through eternity by the Abso- 
lute Thought as having existed at a certain point 
of time, soon to vanish forever, so far as conscious 
personal existence is concerned, in the abyss of 
the infinite ages. 

i Works, 1888, vol. iii, p. 159. 



Hegel 209 

Hegel says at the close of the Philosophy of 
Religion : " The object of these lectures was to 
reconcile reason with religion." 1 It is evident 
that the outcome is much more rational than 
religious, although Hegel's style of exposition has 
enabled many to read into it vastly more of 
Christian truth than it really contains. The true 
relation of the Hegelian philosophy of religion 
to traditional Christianity became apparent when 
the later representatives of the Hegelian school 
of theology, especially Strauss and Biedermann, 
brought out into the light of clear statement what 
Hegel had prudently veiled in vague insinuation 
and ambiguous suggestion. "In truth, what 
happens here, with Biedermann as with Strauss, is 
not as intended a liberation of the spiritual kernel 
from the shell of the sensuous understanding 
and consequently a philosophical justification of 
Christianity, but the last act in the dissolution 
and destruction of the dogma. For this spiritual 
form of dogma, which Biedermann wins as the 
result of his dogmatic labor, is not the Christian 
faith, but the Logos speculation in a new manifes- 
tation, and in that which is cast aside as form of 
the sensuous understanding lies the Christian 

1 Phil, of Religion, ii, p. 28S. 



210 Modem Religious Thought. 

portion of the dogma." * Heinze states as follows 
Augustine's view of the Greek and the Christian 
Logos : " He (Augustine) admits that he has 
found in the Platonic writings all that the 
prologue of the Gospel (John's) contains, except 
the doctrine that the Logos has become flesh. In 
Christianity the Logos has assumed concrete form ; 
in the heathen philosophers the Logos was 
diffused generally throughout the world. Here 
lies the fundamental difference." 2 The unsub- 
stantial nature of Hegel's doctrine of the incarna- 
tion removes the element which clearly distin- 
guishes historical Christianity from the Greek 
speculation. 

1 Kaftan, Die Wahrheit der Christlichen Religion, p. 232. 

2 Lehre vora Logos, p. 331. 






CHAPTER VII. 

THE RATIONALISTS. 

T3EGARDING rationalism as the opponent of 
-*"- ** supernaturalism and naturalism, and as an 
opponent which appealed in the conflict almost 
exclusively to either the logical understanding or 
the moral sense as the criterion of religious truth, 
it may be said to have existed in Germany for 
nearly a century (c. 1740-1836), and to have 
flourished about half that length of time (c. 1760- 
1810) — that is, it took its rise simultaneously 
with the publication of Wolff's writings (1736- 
1750), displayed its greatest strength in Semler's 
critical works (1760-1773), and in Kant's philos- 
ophy (1781-1793), began then to decline gradu- 
ally under the influence of the works of Herder, 
Jacobi, Fichte, and Hegel, and at last died out 
when Schleiermacher, especially in the department 
of theology proper, and Baur and Strauss amongst 
others in the department of Biblical criticism, 
had given currency to ideas and issues which 

211 



212 Modern Religious Thought. 

•■ 

rendered its main contentions objectless and its 
criteria of religious truth invalid." 1 

Johann Semler (1725-1791), often called the 
" father of German rationalism," was long at the 
head of the theological faculty of Halle, the cen- 
ter of the rationalistic movement at that time. 
Semler was not a clear and rigidly systematic 
thinker, but his work as a critic of the Scriptures 
and of ecclesiastical dogmas was very important 
as opening the way and suggesting the problems 
to later critical students. He was the first to 
reject the equal value of the Old and the New 
Testaments, the uniform authority of all parts of 
the Bible, and in general the identification of 
revelation with Scripture. He doubted the Paul- 
ine authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews and 
claimed that the authorship of Peter's epistles is 
uncertain. He would exclude the Apocalypse 
entirely from the canon. He first brought into 
prominence the opposition between the Jewish and 
the anti-Jewish parties in the early Church, which 
figures so prominently in Baur's critical work. 

A discussion of the development of German 
religious thought must suggest something at least 
of the extremes of the later rationalists. 

lEncy. Brit., " Rationalism," XX, p. 289. 



The Rationalists. 213 

Johann Friedrich Rohr (1777-1848) was 
Preacher of the Court and General Superinten- 
dent of Weimar, the most influential leader of 
the Church in the Grand Duchy of Saxony. His 
purpose was to popularize the principles of Kant's 
Philosophy of Religion. Reason is the last resort 
and supreme authority in religion, and the only 
end at which religion aims is morality. Chris- 
tianity is acceptable to reason only because of the 
morality it contains and inculcates. Christology 
should be discarded entirely. The traditional 
doctrine of the person of Christ is full of legen- 
dary and speculative elements and did not originate 
until after the death of Jesus, who teaches a 
morality so pure as to be conformable to the 
demands of reason. 

Heinrich Paulus (1761-1851) is the most widely 
known of the later rationalists, bringing the 
movement to an end with an evident reductio ad 
absurdum. Like Reimarus, he was an Orientalist, 
being professor at Heidelberg during the greater 
part of his academic career. Paulus follows Rohr 
in proceeding from the Kantian standpoint ; he 
aims to reduce Christianity to morality, and Christ 
to an ethical ideal. In the gospel history, there- 
fore, only that can have really occurred which is 



214 Modern Religious Thought, 

admissible from the point of view of Kant's philos- 
ophy. The problem of the Biblical critic is to 
show how the supposed miraculous events may be 
explained as natural occurrences ; and here the 
peculiar genius of Paulus displays itself in the 
invention of the most extraordinary and absurd 
hypotheses. The angels who appeared to the 
shepherds at the birth of Christ were phosphores- 
cent appearances ; Christ used natural remedies 
in his works of healing which the evangelists 
have neglected to mention ; Lazarus was not dead, 
but had fallen into lethargy ; to the disciples, 
waking suddenly from sleep and seeing Jesus con- 
versing with two unknown persons during a beau- 
tiful sunset, the Saviour appeared transfigured 
with a superhuman glory. The kernel of truth 
in the error and fable of gospel history is a man 
of noble moral character, teaching ethical doc- 
trines adapted to promote the highest interests of 
humanity. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

SCHLEIERMACHER. 

|~N Schleiermacher, religion as faith and feeling 
-*" is reasserted against the unsatisfactory and 
barren extremes of rationalism. This tendency 
is good, so far as it is a return to the spiritual 
intuitions of pure Christianity ; it contains, how- 
ever, false and contradictory elements, owing to 
unwise concessions to the prevalent philosophy. 
These errors, however, may have served a tem- 
porarily useful purpose in an age so intoxicated 
with the idea that since Kant all things had be- 
come new. God was a pantheistic first principle ; 
personality, and such power of voluntary change 
as is presupposed in the traditional views of God's 
creation and government of the world, were 
rejected as an anthropomorphic limitation of the 
absolute ; creation and the world development is 
an eternal and necessary process ; miracle is of 
course impossible ; prayer can be only a commun- 
ing with your higher self — the oversoul — and 
immortality " to be eternal in every moment." 

215 



216 Modern Religious Thought. 

The fact that such a system met with general 
acceptance in Germany, and has a wide influence 
even yet, is a painfully striking evidence of the 
deep gulf which divided the intellect and the 
religious feeling of the time. Men were willing 
to seize upon almost any means to bridge the 
chasm, and were ready to close their eyes to 
inconsistencies if only something of the traditional 
faith could find expression in terms apparently 
satisfactory to critical culture. As to Schleier- 
macher's work in general, Professor George P. 
Fisher well remarks : " It is remarkable that 
Schleiermacher was able to crowd so much of 
Christianity into this pantheistic framework." 

In his first important work, " The Discourses 
on Religion," Schleiermacher announces his char- 
acteristic doctrine ; religion lies not in the sphere 
of intellect or will, of thought or conduct, but 
essentially in that of feeling. " Your feeling, in 
so far as it expresses the common being and life 
of yourself and of the All, in so far as you hold 
its particular elements as an activity of God in 
you, mediated by the operation of the world upon 
you, this is your piety. . . . These are exclusively 
the elements of religion ; there is no feeling which 
is not religious, unless it indicate a diseased, 



SchleiermacJier. 217 

abnormal condition of life." 1 In speaking of 
Friedrich Schlegel above, I remarked that Schlei- 
ermacher was deeply influenced by the roman- 
tic school at the time of the composition of his 
"Discourses." We find an evidence of this in- 
fluence, no doubt, in his assertion that all normal 
feeling is religious. It is an expression of the 
extreme of the reactionary swing from the asceti- 
cism of the medieval church. Commenting on 
this statement in the explanatory notes added to 
the Discourses in 1821, Schleiermacher says: "I 
wish to take back nothing from the universality 
of the assertion, and desire by no means to have 
it understood as a rhetorical exaggeration. It is 
clear that Protestantism can consistently assert, as ' 
a general principle, the admissibility of marriage 
for the clergy as opposed to the injurious super- 
stition of the peculiar sacredness of the celibate 
life, only if it assumes and proves that marital 
love and all the accompanying intimacies of the 
sexes are not necessarily destructive of the reli- 
gious disposition of mind." 2 

The proposition, however, that all normal feel- 
ing is religious is evidently in need of further 
definition. Feeling is a mental form which may 

1 Reden, p. 40. I quote the Berlin edition of 1878. 2 p. 93. 



218 Modem Religious Thought. 

be filled with any content, from the lowest to the 
highest. It was Hegel's sarcastic comment on the 
religion of feeling that, on this theory, a dog is 
more religious than a man, for his mental life is 
feeling alone, unregulated by rational thought. 
However Schleiermacher may assert as above, 
that he still holds the opinion that all feeling is 
religious, yet we find, in fact, in his later writings, 
an effort to distinguish certain feelings as peculiar 
to religion. " The common mark of all otherwise 
differing expressions of religion, through which 
they distinguish themselves from all other feel- 
ings, and consequently the essence of religion, is 
this: that we are conscious of ourselves as abso- 
lutely dependent, or, what expresses the same 
thing, as in relation with God." 1 It is well for 
one who has been puzzled by the German term 
" God-consciousness," to note the closing words of 
this quotation. The consciousness of absolute 
dependence is to Schleiermacher the same as the 
consciousness of relationship to God. As the 
Hegelian regards God as thought, and it is never 
very clear whether this thought is human or 
divine, so that the philosopher can discourse in 
a pious way of "seeing all things in God," of 

1 Der Christliche Glaube, §4, p. 14. 



Schleiermacher, 219 

knowing God in the simplest act of knowledge ; 
so the disciple of Schleiermacher, placing the 
essence of religion in the feeling of dependence, 
claims that in this subjective feeling of depend- 
ence we immediately know God. The pantheistic 
philosophy of religion, which prevailed in Ger- 
many in the early part of the century, obliterates 
the common distinctions of the divine and the 
human, and makes clear thought and intelligible 
language on these points well-nigh impossible. 
It is well for plain people to remember this fact 
when they find difficulty in getting a clear notion 
as to the " God-consciousness " of our German 
neighbors. 

It is evident that, if religion is in feeling alone, 
the distinction of true and false does not apply to 
it. Schleiermacher admits this, and asserts that 
all religion is equally true ; it differs only in being 
a more or less noble and complete expression of 
man's moral and spiritual nature. 

I quote some passages from the Second Dis- 
course, on miracle, revelation, etc. 

" What is miracle ? What we call miracle is 
everywhere called sign, indication. Every finite 
thing, however, is a sign of the Infinite. Miracle 
is simply the religious name for event. To me 



220 Modern Religious Thought. 

all is miracle. The more religious you are, the 
more miracle will you see everywhere. 

" What is revelation ? Every original and new 
communication of the Universe to man is a revela- 
tion. Every intuition and every original feeling 
proceeds from revelation. 

u What is prophecy ? Every religious anticipa- 
tion of the other half of a religious event, one 
half being given, is prophecy." 

Schleiermacher's conception of God is suggested 
in the following : " The rejection of the idea of a 
personal deity does not decide against the pres- 
ence of deity in a man's feeling. The ground 
of such a rejection might be a humble conscious- 
ness of the limitation of personal existence, in 
general, and particularly of consciousness joined 
to personality. . . . Whoever insists that the 
essence of piety consists in confessing that the 
Highest Being thinks as a person and wills outside 
the world, cannot have had a wide view in the 
sphere of piety." Zeller declares that Schleier- 
macher was, not unjustly, accused of a Spinozistic 
pantheism. " God and the world are, according 
to Schleiermacher, only different expressions of 
equivalent value. God is not an almighty will 
outside and above the world, who produces effects 



Schleierrnacher. 221 

in it as he desires ; he is only the infinite essence 
of the world itself. In regard to the personality 
of God, Schleierrnacher clearly controverted the 
fundamental assumption of ordinary theism. He 
did not believe in a creation of the world in time, 
he did not believe that the divine will interrupts 
the order of nature by miracle, or that the human 
will elevates itself through its freedom above the 
law of natural necessity." 1 

Immortality is discussed at the close of the 
Second Discourse. A self-conscious, personal 
existence beyond the grave, out of relations to 
space and time, is inconceivable ; and were it 
thinkable, it is selfish for a man to aspire to it. 
It is this type of thought which Lotze has well 
characterized as " that Quixotism of pure reason 
which regards its efforts as almost disgraced if the 
kingdom of heaven and eternal blessedness were 
offered as their reward." 2 The test of a pious 
disposition is the willingness to be absorbed into 
" the One and the All " — to lose conscious iden- 
tity, if this be the will of the Eternal — much as 
the test of genuine conversion among our Puritan 
forefathers was the willingness to be damned for 



1 Zeller, Vortrage, vol. i, p. 204. 

2 Microcosmus, vol. ii, p. 472. 



222 Modem Religious Thought. 

the glory of God. " If our feeling nowhere 
attaches itself to the individual, but if its content 
is our relation to God wherein all that is individual 
and transitory disappears, there can be nothing 
fleeting in it, but all must be eternal. In the 
religious life, then, we may well say that we have 
already offered up and disposed of all that is 
mortal, and that we are actually enjoying immor- 
tality. But the immortality that most men imag- 
ine, and their longing for it, seem to me quite 
opposed to the spirit of piety. . . . Would they 
but attempt to surrender their lives from love to 
God ! Would they but strive to annihilate their 
personality and to live in the One and in the All ! 
Only the man who, denying himself, sinks himself 
in as much of the whole universe as he can attain, 
in whose soul a greater and holier longing has 
arisen, has a right to the hopes that death gives. 
. . . In the midst of finitude to be one with the 
Infinite, and in every moment to be eternal, is 
the immortality of religion." 1 

Schleiermacher denies that he repudiates the 
Christian doctrine of immortality. Zeller's judg- 
ment, however, is doubtless correct where he 
says: "Schleiermacher knew, as philosopher, no 

iReden.pp. 100, 101. 



Schleiermacher, 223 

continued existence of the individual after death, 
and at the loss of his dearest friend he could only 
say to the sorrowing widow (later his wife), that 
there is no destruction for the spirit, but that the 
personal life is not the essence of the spirit, it is 
only an outward presentment thereof." 2 

Schleiermacher's great theological work is " The 
Christian Faith according to the Principles of the 
Protestant Church" (1821). It is the fruit of 
the study and reflection of his best years. Its 
leading principle is the application of his con- 
ception of religion as feeling to the traditional 
doctrines of the Church. 

Schleiermacher abandons completely the tradi- 
tional method of prefacing the treatment of the 
specifically Christian doctrines by a natural theol- 
ogy — the attempt to form a basis for the revealed 
truths by proving, so far as possible on rational 
grounds, the existence of God, inspiration of the 
Scriptures, etc. Rationalism had abused natural 
theology, beginning with the attempt to prove, 
and ending by practically denying all Christian 
doctrine. Schleiermacher therefore will allow the 
reason no authority in religious matters, using as 

1 Zeller, Vortrage, vol. i, p. 204. The letter of Schleiermacher to Frau 
von Willich in Life of Schleiermacher, trans, by F. Rowan, vol. ii, p. 80. 



224 Modern Religious Thought. 

the test of Christian truth simply the normal 
expression of Christian consciousness. Each has 
a half-truth, and the reconciliation of the two 
positions is in essence the fundamental problem 
of theology ; it is difficult to say which position, 
emphasized to the exclusion of the other, is the 
more dangerous error. In preaching to the un- 
converted, or to those ignorant of Christianity, the 
natural pedagogical method is to lead them from 
some known truth to the Christian thought. This 
is Paul's method on Mars' Hill. His sermon, as we 
have it, is all natural theology excepting the last 
verse ; and here, where Christ is first mentioned, 
a rational and historic proof is stated that Christ 
is the ordained judge — that is, God has raised 
him from the dead. At this point, it is to be 
observed, the discourse was interrupted by the 
scoffs of the auditors ; so that, had Paul pro- 
ceeded on Schleiermacher's method, he could 
have obtained no hearing at all. The point which 
Schleiermacher emphasizes — necessary to the 
proper control of the rationalizing tendency — is 
that Christian truth must be " spiritually dis- 
cerned " ; that it can be appreciatively known 
only in personal experience ; he that doeth the 
will shall know of the doctrine. The fatal defect 



Schleiermacher. 225 

of this position, when totally separated from 
natural theology and apologetics, is that it be- 
comes completely subjective — it hangs in the air, 
with no basis in objective and universally valid 
fact. It is this subjective feature which makes 
Schleiermacher's system so incomprehensible to 
the common sense thinker. Why is Christ sin- 
less ? Why is he divine, so far as we consider 
him so ? Because I find him such in my Christian 
experience. Schleiermacher's position shows the 
influence not only of the philosophical and criti- 
cal conditions of the time but also of the German 
ecclesiastical system. In a country where the 
children are all baptized in infancy and confirmed 
a dozen years later, the efforts of the Christian 
teacher are directed not so much to the conversion 
of the ungodly, as to the defense of existing faith 
from the attacks of anti-Christian unbelief. 

For Schleiermacher, then, the problem of theol- 
ogy is simply the analysis of the content of Chris- 
tian experience. " Christian articles of faith are 
the conceptions of the religious states of the 
Christian mind, expressed in language." * Objec- 
tive facts and relations, such as the creation of 
the world, are approached from this subjective 

i Christ. Glaube, § 15. 



226 Modern Religious Thought. 

standpoint. The section which treats of creation 
has the general heading, " Description of our reli- 
gious self-consciousness, so far as the relation 
between God and the world expresses itself 
therein." 1 It follows from the feeling of absolute 
dependence on God that the world was created, 
and is sustained, by God; farther than this — the 
when and the how — Christian consciousness does 
not inform us, and we need not inquire. This 
method of treatment is thoroughly characteristic 
of Schleiermacher and should be carefully noted, 
as it suggests what are for him, in every case, the 
criterion and the limits of Christian truth. Who 
and what is Jesus Christ ? He is the revealer of 
God, the Saviour. Why? Christian conscious- 
ness declares it. How does Christ reveal God 
and save men? Christian consciousness has no 
answer to these questions, and it is unnecessary to 
raise them. If you go farther, as most plain 
people will wish to do, and inquire on what 
grounds Christian consciousness lays claim to 
infallible authority, you cease to be a Christian, 
and Schleiermacher has nothing more to say to 
you. 

Instead of beginning with a natural theology, 

i Christ. Glaube, §36. 



Schleiermacher, 227 

the starting point for Schleiermacher is the experi- 
ence of the Christian as a member of the existing 
Christian community, the Church. As a member 
of this community, the Christian is conscious of 
salvation from sin and of union and peace with 
God ; this consciousness cannot flow from the 
Church itself, for it is composed only of erring 
and sinful persons ; therefore, this religious con- 
sciousness finds its source in the founder of the 
community — Jesus of Nazareth. Theology, as I 
have said, is for Schleiermacher the systematic 
exhibition of the content of Christian conscious- 
ness. Sin is defined as that which hinders the 
development of the God-consciousness in the soul. 
Redemption is the influence of the Redeemer, 
working through the Church, which brings the 
believer into conscious unity and harmony with 
God. 

In treating of the person of Christ, Schleier- 
macher begins by establishing the sinlessness and 
moral perfection of the Saviour. He does not, of 
course, appeal to an inspired Scripture or to 
Christ's miraculous power, but rests merely on 
internal grounds. In connection with the Chris- 
tian community, the believer finds himself brought 
into consciousness of God and drawn toward 



228 Modern Religious .Thought. 

moral perfection. Whence comes this perfect 
moral influence ? Not from the imperfect mem- 
bers of the community, but from its founder, 
who is therefore sinless. This does not appear 
a very substantial basis for a religious system ; 
and it surely has its weaknesses; but* we should 
not fail to recognize its strength — the powerful 
appeal to personal experience as the test of reli- 
gious truth, " He that doeth the will shall know 
of the doctrine." The question here, as Strauss 
properly insisted later, is whether the Christian 
community might not have developed an ideal of 
moral perfection, from the humanly imperfect 
Jesus. As to the deity of Christ, it consists not 
in a supposed miraculous birth, or metaphysical 
oneness with God, but in the unique perfection of 
his God-consciousness. Any man whose personal- 
ity is constantly determined by the God-conscious- 
ness is divine. This has been true, however, only 
of Jesus. 

Christ's redeeming work is that he imparts to 
the believer a measure of his own God-conscious- 
ness. In accomplishing this, the Church is the 
medium of the Saviour's activity, standing in 
essentially the same relation to the believer as 
Christ, while in the flesh, to his disciples. The 



S Meier macher, 229 

doctrine of the Trinity is abandoned, and the 
Holy Spirit becomes merely the generic spirit or 
collective influence of the Christian community. 
" Under the expression Holy Ghost is understood 
the living unity of the Christian community as a 
moral person." 1 

Christ did not do anything, as a sacrifice or sub- 
stitute for sinners, to make possible the forgive- 
ness of sin. His sufferings and death were not 
necessary elements in his reconciling work. 
Christ's perfect example, affecting the believer 
through the moral influence of the Church, makes 
the believer ideally righteous, and he is so con- 
sidered by the judge, — essentially as with Kant. 

It is claimed as a great excellence of Schleier- 
macher's Christology, as contrasted with Kant's 
and Hegel's, that he preserves a direct relation to 
the historic Jesus. In the concluding dissertation 
of his Life of Jesus, 2 Strauss subjects Schleier- 
macher's view of the person of Christ to a pene- 
trating criticism. Strauss holds that Schleier- 
macher's doctrine satisfies neither science nor the 
faith of the Church, and instead of presenting a 
genuinely historical Christ, issues logically in the 



i Christ. Glaube, § 116, vol. ii, p. 231. 

2 Marion Evans' trans., vol. ii, pp. 884-887. 



230 Modern Religious Thought. 

ideal view of Christ's person advocated by Strauss 
himself. Schleiermacher's Christology is unsatis- 
factory to science, in Strauss' opinion, for the 
assumption of such a unique God-consciousness 
as Schleiermacher attributes to Christ "involves 
the violation of the laws of nature by a miracle." 
It is unsatisfactory to the Church, for it abandons 
certain elements considered essential to Christian 
faith, as the resurrection and ascension. It is not 
necessary therefore for Schleiermacher to assume 
that the historic Jesus was a miracle of sinless 
perfection, but merely that the Church has ideal- 
ized its founder. " We may now estimate the 
truth of the reproach which made Schleiermacher 
so indignant ; namely, that his was not an historical, 
but an ideal Christ. The reproach is just in rela- 
tion to the consequences of Schleiermacher's sys- 
tem, since to effect what Schleiermacher makes 
him effect no other Christ is necessary, and 
according to the principles of Schleiermacher 
respecting the relation of God to the world, of 
the supernatural to the natural, no other Christ is 
possible than an ideal one." 

I have criticized Schleiermacher's general posi- 
tion as too subjective, and yet it is not subjective 
enough to accomplish his main purpose — to 



Schleiermaeher. 231 

reconcile science and Christianity. The principle 
of his reconciliation is the specious but impossible 
one of totally separating the scientific or philo- 
sophical sphere from the religious. This principle 
has been made familiar to us by Herbert Spencer. 
Spencer would limit the religious to the unknow- 
able background of knowable phenomena ; Schlei- 
ermaeher to the subjective states of the devout 
consciousness. Neither attempt can succeed, for 
in each case the spheres of faith and knowledge 
overlap. Religion refuses to be relegated to 
the unknowable, to be reduced to " a x n 
power of mystery " ; but persists in making some 
positive assertions about the known world, and in 
exerting a real influence in it. And it is just as 
impossible for a man to keep his religion — if he 
has any worthy of the name — cooped up within 
his own head ; for it must assume some positive 
knowledge of, and must hold some real relation 
to, the historical and existing facts of the external 
world. Strauss is plainly right when he says of 
Schleiermacher's position : " If not by reason of 
their source, yet by reason of their content and 
expression, the theological propositions belong to 
the province of knowledge, so far as they assert 
facts, historical, psychological, and the like ; and 



232 Modern Religious Thought. 

here the demand of course appears that they con- 
tradict neither the formal nor the material laws of 
knowledge, that they involve us in no difficulty 
with science. . . . The conflict between philoso- 
phy and religion, therefore, in this situation returns 
anew." 1 

As I have remarked before of Augustine, how- 
ever, it would be unjust to one of the noblest 
personalities in Christian history to estimate 
Schleiermacher entirely from this brief sketch 
and criticism. This can be fairly done, and one 
can comprehend his extraordinary influence in 
the German Church, only as he studies Schleier- 
macher's writings and yields to the sway of his 
lofty eloquence and spiritual intensity. His 
errors of theological theory belong to the infirmi- 
ties of human intelligence ; his deep sense of a 
divine call to preach a comforting and inspiring 
faith to his doubting age, and his stedfast and 
ardent devotion in this work, were doubtless the 
gift of the Spirit of Christ. " Divinely swayed by 
an irresistible necessity within me, I feel myself 
compelled to speak. . . . Nor is it done from any 
caprice or accident. Rather it is the pure neces- 
sity of my nature ; it is a divine call ; it is what 

1 Glaubenslehre, Einleitung, § 2. 



Schleiermacher. 233 

determines my position in the world and makes 
me what I am. . . . Acknowledge, then, with me 
what a priceless gift the appearance of such a 
person must be, when the higher feeling has risen 
to inspiration, and can no longer be kept silent; 
when every pulse-beat of his spiritual life takes 
communicable form in word or figure. . . . This 
is the true priest of the highest. The heavenly 
and eternal he exhibits as an object of enjoyment 
and agreement, as the sole exhaustless source of 
the things towards which the whole endeavor of 
common humanity is directed. In this way he 
strives to awaken the slumbering germ of a 
better humanity, to kindle love for higher things, 
to change the common life into a nobler, to recon- 
cile the children of earth with the heaven that 
bears them, and to counterbalance the deep attach- 
ment of the age to the baser side. This is the 
higher priesthood that announces the inner mean- 
ing of all spiritual secrets, and speaks from the 
kingdom of God." 1 

1 First Discourse. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE HEGELIAN SCHOOL. 

T HAVE said above that Hegel's theory of the 
-*- development of history gave the controlling 
impulse to the Tubingen school of criticism. 
The prominent men in this school were Friedrich 
Christian Baur and David Strauss — the former 
by reason of his important conclusions as to the 
origin of the New Testament and the develop- 
ment of early church history, the latter because 
of his " Life of Jesus," a summary of the results 
of previous criticism which produced an extraor- 
dinary sensation. 

Baur's general position is the Hegelian assump- 
tion that a miraculous revelation is impossible and 
unnecessary ; the problem of the critic therefore 
is to account on rational grounds for the rise of 
Christianity. " Any faith in supernatural religion, 
with which he began his labors as a professor, ere 
long disappeared, and the great aim of all his 
studies and researches was to find the natural 
factors or principles out of which Christianity 

234 



The Hegelian School. 235 

arose in the world." 1 Proceeding from his pri- 
mary assumption of the antagonism between the 
Petrine and Pauline parties, or between Jewish 
and Gentile Christianity, Baur arrived at the con- 
elusion that the only genuine historical foundation 
of Christianity is to be found in the four epistles 
of Paul — ■ I and II Corinthians, Galatians, and 
Romans. Our present gospels are of later origin, 
based upon oral tradition and upon earlier writings 
now lost. 

It is not necessary to dwell at any length upon 
Strauss' Life of Jesus, as all the world is familiar 
with its totally destructive result. The principle 
of Strauss' historic criticism is expressed with 
naive frankness in the preface to his " New Life 
of Jesus " (1864). " He to whom the conceptions, 
patronized by the Church and by the prevalent 
theology, as to the supernatural character and 
concatenation of the circumstances of the life of 
Jesus, have become intolerable, will find his best 
means of effectual release in historical inquiry. 
For having adopted the fundamental conviction 
that everything that happens, or ever happened, 
happened naturally — that even the most distin- 
guished of men was still man, and that conse- 

lEncy. Brit., Ill, p. 448. 



236 Modern Religious Thought. 

quently the supernatural coloring in the accounts 
of early Christianity must be adventitious and 
unreal, he is induced to expect that the more 
exactly he can trace the true course of events, 
the more their natural character will appear." 1 
Whatever may be the final result of the endless 
discussions of the critics as to the authorship of 
the New Testament writings (it is Strauss' opinion 
that German criticism is going to seed), he holds 
that this much at least is made out ; " that in the 
person and acts of Jesus no supernaturalism shall 
be suffered to remain." 2 

The Hegelian school of criticism, however, has 
abandoned the crude conceptions of deism and 
rationalism as to the origin of religious ideas and 
institutions. Instead of tracing religion to the 
trickery of priests or the policy of political rulers, 
the Hegelian, to whom history is the progress- 
ive revelation or incarnation of the divine Idea, 
regards every religious phenomenon or conception 
as a manifestation of the Absolute Spirit, true 
and useful for the age and people when and where 
it appears. For the same reason, however, — its 
temporary and local truth and value, — this con- 
ception must be outgrown, and the advancing 

JNew Life of Jesus, Preface, p. x. 2 Ibid., Preface, p. xii. 



The Hegelian School. 237 

race must develop and serve increasingly higher 
ideals. The central thought of Strauss' Life of 
Jesus is here suggested. A divine revelation, 
attested by miracles and imaged in a single historic 
person, was true and useful for the religious 
thought of the unenlightened past ; but since 
science has destroyed miracle and Hegel has 
found spirit in all things material, religious aspira- 
tion is no longer content with the material form 
and circumscribed nature of the former revelation. 
The demand now is for a race-ideal — a syn- 
thetic inference from the best thought and noblest 
achievement of humanity. God is to become in- 
carnate in the race, instead of in a single individ- 
ual. " When it is said of God that he is a Spirit, 
and of man that he also is a Spirit, it follows that 
the two are not essentially distinct. . . . The 
Infinite Spirit is real only when it discloses itself 
in finite spirits ; as the finite spirit is true only 
when it merges itself in the Infinite. . . . The 
true and real existence of Spirit, therefore, is in 
the God-man ; in the interchange and withdrawal 
between the two, which on the part of God is 
revelation, and on the part of man religion. . . • 
This God-man uniting in a single being the divine 
essence and the human personality, it may be said 



238 Modern Religious Thought. 

of him that he has the Divine Spirit for a father 
and a woman for his mother. Having the will to 
exist only for God, and not at all for self, he is 
sinless and perfect. . . . The God-man is taken 
by death out of the sight of his cotemporaries ; 
he enters into their imagination and memory ; the 
unity of the divine and human in him becomes 
part of the general consciousness. If reality is 
ascribed to the unity of the divine and human 
natures, is this equivalent to the admission that 
this unity must actually have been once manifested 
in one individual? This is indeed not the mode 
in which Idea realizes itself; it is not wont to 
express itself perfectly in one individual and im- 
perfectly in all the rest. Is not the idea of the 
unity of the divine and human natures a real one 
in a far higher sense, when I regard the whole 
race of mankind as its realization, than when I 
single out one man as such a realization ? is not 
an incarnation of God from eternity a truer one 
than an incarnation limited to a particular point 
of time ? " 1 

I will refer to Strauss' Glaubenslehre (1840) 
only to call attention to his interpretation of 
Schleiermacher's doctrine of immortality. In the 

1 Life of Jesus, Evans' trans., vol. ii, pp. 892-895. 



The Hegelian School. 239 

closing pages of the work Strauss suggests the 
conclusion that immortality can be predicated of 
the race only ; the individual can live after death 
only in the admiring and grateful memory of 
posterity. " If the question is raised what result 
we reach of a positive nature over against these 
negations, all depends upon what Hegel suggests ; 
that immortality be conceived not primarily as 
something future, but as a present qualrty of the 
spirit, as its inner universality, its power to elevate 
itself above everything finite to the Idea. . . . 
The saying of Schleiermacher, ' In the midst of 
finitude to be one with the Infinite, and to be 
eternal in every moment,' is all that modern 
science is able to say concerning immortality." l 
In Strauss' last important work, "The Old 
Faith and the New" (1872), it is plain that he 
has discovered the hollow and illusory nature of 
Hegelian Christianity, and he is ready frankly to 
admit that " we are not Christians." His discus- 
sion of immortality, which will indicate his nega- 
tive result in general, shows that the above admis- 
sion is very well grounded. " Perhaps the longest 
dissertation will be expected of me concerning 
the compensation which our conception of the 

1 Glaubenslehre, vol. ii, pp. 737, 738. 



240 Modern Religious Thought. 

universe may offer in place of the Christian belief 
in immortality, but a brief remark must suffice 
here. He who cannot help himself in this matter 
is beyond help, is not yet ripe for our standpoint. 
He who on the one hand is not satisfied in being 
able to revive within himself the eternal ideas of 
the Cosmos, of the progress and destinies of man- 
kind ; who cannot, within his own heart, render 
the dead he loved and worshiped immortal in the 
truest sense ; who, amid his exertions on behalf of 
his family, his labors in his calling, his cooperation 
with others in promoting the prosperity of his 
country as well as the general welfare of his 
fellow citizens, his enjoyment of the beautiful in 
art and nature, — who, amid all this, does not 
become conscious that he himself is only called to 
participate in it for a span of time, who cannot 
finally prevail upon himself to depart from this 
life in gratitude for all that has been given him, — 
well, him we must remit to Moses and the proph- 
ets, who themselves knew nothing of immortality, 
and yet were Moses and the prophets still." 1 

The general conclusion of Strauss in this work, 
logically sound from his premises, is that for 
future generations science and literature must hold 

1 The Old Faith and the New, Holt's trans., N. Y., 1873, p. 214. 



The Hegelian School. 241 

the place which religion has occupied in the past. 
We find Strauss at last, therefore, in substantial 
agreement with our own Colonel Ingersoll, who 
would provide a young man with a physiology 
and a copy of Shakespeare as a sufficient religious 
equipment for the battle of life. 

Of the later Hegelians, Alois E. Biedermann, 
who was professor in Zurich, is considered one of 
the strongest men. He is true to Hegel in assert- 
ing that ultimate being can be apprehended in 
thought, and that in the Christian life the Abso- 
lute Spirit in a sense realizes his own nature, so 
that in all religious experiences the Absolute 
Spirit is the efficient ground. Biedermann endeav- 
ors, however, to depart from Hegel in asserting of 
the finite spirit a certain self-subsistence which 
shall give reality to sin and conversion ; thus 
introducing a contradictory element which must 
make his conclusion either ambiguous or illogical. 

An important influence in current thought is 
the modified Hegelianism connected in England 
with the name of the late Professor T. H. Green, 
of Oxford — represented in its general theory by 
Professor Otto Pfleiderer, of Berlin, and Professor 
Josiah Royce, of Harvard University. From 
Kant's " transcendental unity of apperception " 



242 Modem Religious Thought. 

has been developed an all-embrae-ing World- 
Consciousness, in which the finite mind knows the 
external object, and the knowledge of which is 
religion. Finite beings and things are thoughts 
of the Infinite Consciousness, and the history of 
the universe is the progressive unfolding of the 
Absolute Thought. The transcendental unity of 
apperception has thus been made the source of all 
truth and life ; it is the Hegelian God, deified and 
enthroned, and universal humanity is summoned 
to bow and worship. What is Kant's transcen- 
dental unity of apperception? It is simply the 
unity of the finite consciousness — the sense of 
oneness, selfhood, which abides through all chang- 
ing mental states, 1 and makes possible the union 
of subject and object in the act of knowledge. 
One of the most extraordinary achievements of 
Kant's idealistic successors was to take this 
unpretentious principle of our inner life, disguise 
it in the garb of an unintelligible terminolog}^ 
quote Scripture about it, and so metamorphose it 
into the Divine Being. The result is that we 
"see all things in God," "in the transcendental 
unity of apperception we live and move and have 
our being." This theory has manifest advantages 

iSee Seth, Hegelianisin and Personality. 



The Hegelian School. 243 

in dealing with ultimate philosophical and reli- 
gious questions. 1 God here has two or three dis- 
tinct meanings, and the philosopher can use the 
one which suits his convenience ; so that there 
is little difficulty in refuting the common sense 
objector, or reducing him to speechless astonish- 
ment. God may mean (1) the unity of the finite 
consciousness ; (2) the general principle of unity 
in the universe [(1) and (2) may fall together 
for the pantheistic idealist] ; (3) the popular 
notion of Christian theism. It is very easy on 
this theory to prove the existence of God. Do 
you know the book or the table before you [in the 
unity of your inner consciousness (1)] ? Then 
you know God [which means (3) to the hearer], 
for he is the principle of unity in this knowledge. 
It is well to note that Professor Green, who 
developed this type of thought in England, is the 
Professor Gray of Mrs. Ward's novel, Robert 
Elsmere. When Elsmere has lost his faith in 
traditional Christianity, he goes to Gray for conso- 
lation; and Gray calls his thought, in orthodox 
Hegelian fashion, from the material and historical 
to the spiritual, from the dead Jesus to the living 



1 For a clear and thoroughgoing expression of this view, see Edward 
Caird's The Evolution of Religion. 



244 Modern Religious Thought. 

revelation of God in his own soul. Elsmere then 
combines, more or less unconsciously, the concep- 
tions of God distinguished above, (1), (2), and 
(3), in such a way and measure as suits his taste 
or religious need, and so constructs, no doubt, a 
reasonably satisfactory religion. 

We should never fail, however, to recognize the 
element of truth in the Hegelian doctrine. This 
truth is the useful and necessary corrective of 
much of our current agnosticism — as that of 
Herbert Spencer. Spencer studies matter, mind, 
the religious nature of man, etc., and finds every- 
where lines which run up and converge in an 
infinite principle of unity ; and yet he asserts of 
this principle that in itself it is unknowable ; we 
can only know that it is. It is manifest that if 
our reason is trustworthy, this principle must be 
adequate to account for the world, and therefore 
we know much more about it than its bare exist- 
ence. The Hegelian contention, and in general it 
is a noble and true one, is that the laws of our 
thought are reliable, and therefore we are justified 
in assuming as invincibly true what logically 
holds good of this infinite being. The unwar- 
ranted and misleading element in the Hegelian 
exposition is that the remote logical inference that 



The Hegelian School. 245 

there is an infinite principle of unity is treated as 
though it were immediately known in the simplest 
act of knowledge. 

It seems very easy, on this type of Hegelian 
theory, to bring back the essentials of Christian- 
ity, which are supposed to be no longer tenable 
on traditional grounds ; but it is almost or quite 
as easy, from the same premises, to destroy 
entirely belief in God and all religion. The 
Hegelian asserts that we know God in thought; 
and in his confident dependence on this doctrine, 
has discredited or denied every other means of 
knowing God. This position, however, is at 
variance with the conscious experience of practi- 
cally all men ; the testimony of self-consciousness, 
as commonly interpreted, is that the human mind 
possesses an independent power of knowledge and 
of self-direction. The unitary principle in knowl- 
edge is not commonly or necessarily attributed to 
the Absolute Spirit, but to the human understand- 
ing, unity of apperception — call it what you 
will. If, then, the Hegelian teaches the plain 
man that God exists and is known only in the 
unity of human knowledge, the easiest and most 
natural inference is that such a God is mere 
illusion j is only an unwarranted objectivization of 



246 Modern Religious Thought, 

some aspect or faculty of the human mind itself. 
This is the inference drawn by Ludwig Feuerbach, 
in his "Essence of Christianity" (1841). "Reli- 
gion, or at least the Christian religion, is the rela- 
tion of man to himself, or more correctly to his 
own being ; but the relation to his own being as 
to another being. The divine Being is nothing 
else than the human being." 1 " This being is 
nothing else than the intellect — the reason or 
the understanding. God is the objectivized being 
of the understanding. The pure, complete, fault- 
less, divine Being is the self-consciousness of the 
understanding — the understanding's conscious- 
ness of its own perfection." 2 

" The true critique of doctrine is its history." 3 
Strauss, the Hegelian, enunciated this proposi- 
tion in relation to Christian dogma. It applies 
equally well to the Hegelian doctrine. In my 
opinion, Feuerbach's nihilism is the logical result 
and the unanswerable refutation of the Hegelian 
position. 

Otto Pfleiderer, now professor of theology in 
Berlin University, was a pupil of Baur, and 
represents the traditional spirit of the Tubingen 



1 Essence of Christianity, Leipzig, 1883, p. 50. 2 Ibid. p. 76. 
3 Strauss, Glaubenslelire, Einleitung, § 6. 



The Hegelian School. 247 

school both in its strength — wide and accurate 
scholarship, and power of luminous and compre- 
hensive exposition — and also in its weakness — 
critical presuppositions which exclude the super- 
natural. His position is concisely stated in a 
recent German review, in an article on the 
u Essence of Christianity." 1 The characteristic 
essence of Christianity is the consciousness of 
being a child of God. This consciousness was 
the strikingly new element in the personality of 
Jesus; not in the traditional orthodox sense of an 
unique metaphysical union with God, but in the 
sense of an ethical and religious relationship to 
God which was first fully realized in Jesus, but 
may and should be realized in us all. 2 " Redemp- 
tion in the evangelical sense is not a single miracu- 
lous event, which has been completed outside 
of humanity through a supernatural mediator 
between deity and humanity, but it is an inner 
process in the hearts of men which repeats itself 
everywhere and always." 3 Pfleiderer states much 
in Strauss' spirit the gradual idealization or 
deification of Jesus by the early Church. The 
Reformation made a beginning in the direction of 

1 Zeitsch. fur Wissen. Theol., 1893. Erstes Heft. 
2 Ibid. pp. 4 and 5. 3 Ibid. p. 21. 



248 Modern Religious Thought. 

abandoning this perversion of truth, and its 
resulting errors and superstitions ; but only a 
beginning. " For in doctrine Christianity still 
clings essentially to the unspiritual, ghostly super- 
naturalism which from the time of the Jewish 
apocalypse and the Hellenic gnosis has dominated 
the thought of Christendom, and concealed the 
true essence of Christianity under mythological 
forms. To destroy these forms, and thereby to 
allow its liberated truth to stream forth in new 
light, its healing love to penetrate diseased 
humanity with new power, — this is the problem, 
the holy mission, of all those who believe in the 
victorious coming of the kingdom of the divine- 
sonship, and hope for the appearance of the new 
world where God shall be worshiped in spirit and 
in truth." 1 

1 Ibid. p. 41. For an English version of Pfleiderer's article see " The 
New World," Sept., 1892. 



CHAPTER X. 

NEW ORTHODOXY AND NEW LUTHERANISM. 

A S I have suggested above, we are not to sup- 
-^ -V- pose that liberalism, with its destructive 
critical results, has encountered no opposition in 
the field of German thought. Through the whole 
course of the theological movement we have been 
tracing, devout and scholarly men have devoted 
their powers to the defense of orthodox truth; 
and if they are less widely known than their 
liberal opponents, it is for much the same reasons 
that Colonel Ingersoll is more talked about than 
many an orthodox pastor who is of much more 
value and importance in the world. 

Of the schools which have been most con- 
spicuous in the defense of the traditional church 
forms and dogmas, are to be named "The New 
Orthodoxy " and " The New Lutheranism." The 
influence of these schools has been unfortunately 
limited by their alliance with illiberal and re- 
actionary political tendencies, and also by the 
fact that their representatives, in their extreme 

249 



250 Modern Religious Thought. 

antipathy to the modern spirit of innovation, have 
too often engaged in a general crusade against 
all progress. 

Claus Harms, of the new orthodox party, made 
a great sensation (1817) by his ninety-five theses 
in continuation of those of Luther, directed against 
reason, which he declares to be the modern Anti- 
christ. Some of these theses read as follows : — 

" I. If our Master and Lord, Jesus Christ, says, 
Repent ! He wishes men to form themselves ac- 
cording to his doctrine ; He does not formulate 
his doctrine according to men, as is done now. 

" IX. The pope of our time, our Antichrist, is, 
in relation to faith, reason ; in relation to action, 
conscience. 

" XL Conscience cannot pardon sin. Pardon 
belongs to God. 

" XXIV. We read in an old hymn : ' Two 
places hast thou, man, before thee.' In our days 
they have put an end to the devil and plugged 
up hell. 

"XXVIII. According to the old faith, God 
created man ; according to the new, it is man who 
creates God. 

"XXXII. The pretended rational religion is 
devoid of reason, or of religion, or of both. 



New Orthodoxy. 251 

"LI. We regard the very words of our re- 
vealed religion as holy ; we do not consider them 
as a dress which can be taken off religion, but as 
its body. It is owing to them that it has life." 

The most influential and renowned of the 
champions of the new orthodoxy was Ernst Wil- 
helm Hengstenberg (1802-1869). After 1824 he 
was connected with the theological faculty at 
Berlin, and as editor of the Evangelical Church 
Gazette maintained a fierce warfare upon ration- 
alism in every form, especially in relation to Old 
Testament criticism, One deep purpose through 
his life was the uncompromising defense of the 
Augsburg Confession, as he was convinced that 
rigid adherence to the symbolical books of the 
Church was the only remedy that could be opposed 
to the destructive criticism of Strauss and Baur. 
He asserted the absolute infallibility and the lit- 
eral inspiration of Holy Scripture, and ably 
defended the writings both of the Old and the 
New Testaments against the attacks of criticism. 

The new Lutheran party came into prominence 
after the year 1848, when the German govern- 
ments were using every means to repress the 
revolutionary democracy. " The object of New 
Lutheranism is to defend the throne and the altar, 



252 Modem Religious Thought. 

the two divine institutions which are alike threat- 
ened by the democracy, and to combat to the 
death the anarchy of ideas and the progress of 
parliamentary institutions." 1 

In its conceptions of the Church and the minis- 
try this party is strongly sacramentarian, making 
the Church a repository and dispenser of the divine 
grace. It is practically the Romish idea that 
when the sacraments are properly administered 
they possess an efficacy in themselves, apart from 
and irrespective of the faith of the recipients. 

The most prominent figure in this school was 
Friedrich Stahl (1802-1861). "In his view the 
State is the kingdom of God upon earth, and the 
Church is a juridical institution, guaranteed by 
compacts and administered by the clergy. What 
the clergy are in the Church, the prince is in the 
State ; he is the vicar of God, His delegate. In 
the State, God himself is the true master and 
legislator. The prince reigns only in His name; 
his authority rests only on the divine institution 
of royalty. In like manner, revelation is the 
authority in the Church, and reason owes it an 
absolute submission. Revolution and rationalism 
are the two inseparable scourges of modern. times 

1 Lichtenf elder, Hist, of Ger. Theol. in 19th Century, p. 421. 



New Orthodoxy. 253 

which undermine the foundations of obedience 
and provoke the emancipation of man from God." 1 
The distinguished Old Testament scholar, Franz 
Delitzsch, was allied in many points with the New 
Lutheran school, especially in holding what ap- 
proaches an ex opere operato view of the sacra- 
ments. 

1 Lichtenfelder, p. 428. 



CHAPTER XI. 

NEANDER AND WEISS. 

TOHANN AUGUST NEANDER (1789-1850), 
*~* a pupil and afterwards friend and fellow 
professor of Schleiermacher at Berlin, was distin- 
guished as the church historian of the school of 
Schleiermacher. Of the many early works on the 
life of Christ written in reply to Strauss, Neander's 
(1839) is regarded as the most able and satisfac- 
tory. His introduction to this work contains 
some very judicious remarks as to presuppositions 
in critical discussion. "It has been often said 
that, in order to true inquiry, we must take noth- 
ing for granted. Of late this statement has been 
reiterated anew with special reference to the 
exposition of the life of Christ. At the outset of 
our work we refuse to meet such a demand. We 
cannot entirely free ourselves from presupposi- 
tions, which are born with our nature, and which 
attach to the fixed course of progress in which we 
ourselves are involved. They control our con- 
sciousness, whether we will or no; and the sup- 

254 



Neander and Weiss. 255 

posed freedom from them is, in fact, nothing else 
but the exchange of one set for another. . . . The 
work of science can only be to distinguish the 
presuppositions which an inward necessity con- 
strains us to recognize, from such as are purely 
voluntary. . . . What, then, is the special presup- 
position with which we must approach the con- 
templation of the life of Christ? It is one on 
which hangs the very being of the Christian as 
such ; the existence of the Christian Church and 
the nature of Christian consciousness. . . . It is, 
in a word, the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son 
of God in a sense which cannot be predicated of 
any human being. . . . Now if we can show that 
the life of Christ, without the aid of the First 
Truth which forms the ground of our conception 
of it, must be unintelligible, while on the contrary, 
with its assistance, we can frame the life into a 
harmonious whole, then its claims will be estab- 
lished even in the exposition of the Life itself." 1 
These quotations will indicate the spirit and 
method of Neander, and show that he is well fitted 
to supplement Schleiermacher's work by bringing 
the subjectivity of Christian consciousness into 
harmony with the historic facts. He presents, 

1 Bohn's translation. 



256 Modern Religious Thought, 

unquestionably, the proper standpoint for the 
Christian historian or student of history — to 
accept the truth of Christianity as a provisional 
hypothesis, and by a candid examination of the 
historic sources, to determine whether the hypoth- 
esis satisfies the conditions of the problem. 1 
There is a constant temptation both for the clergy 
and the laity, in their philosophical and historical 
studies, to seek to grasp God by naked intellect, 
by historical proof or scientific demonstration, to 
forget the apostolic truth that divine things must 
be spiritually discerned. Neander well remarks on 
this point : " It is only he who has a ' Christian 
consciousness ' that can recognize Christ in the 
fragments of tradition and the manifestations of 
history, or that can comprehend the history of 
Christ and his Church." 

Neander stoutly asserts, against the school of 
Baur, that the Fourth Gospel was written by the 
apostle John. " It could have emanated from 
none other than that 'beloved disciple' upon 
whose soul the image of the Saviour had left its 
deepest impress." 

Neander presents the view of Scriptural inspi- 

1 The danger of being unduly influenced here by your presupposition 
is properly emphasized by Weiss in criticizing Schleiermacher's Life of 
of Christ. See Weiss, Life of Christ, vol. i, p. 194. 



Neander and Weiss. 257 

ration which is perhaps the dominant one at 
present in most schools of German theology. " It 
may be regarded as one of the greatest boons 
which the purifying process of Protestant theology 
in Germany has conferred upon faith as well as 
science, that the old mechanical view of inspira- 
tion has been so generally abandoned. That doc- 
trine, and the forced harmonies to which it led, 
demanded a clerklike accuracy in the evangelical 
accounts, and could not admit even the slightest 
contradictions in them ; but we are now no more 
compelled to have recourse to subtilties against 
which our sense of truth rebels. . . . The chasms 
of gospel history were unavoidable in the trans- 
mission of divine truth through such lowly human 
means. But this only affords room for the exer- 
cise of our faith — faith whose root is to be found, 
not in science, not in demonstration, but in the 
humble and self-denying submission of our spirits. 
Our scientific views may be defective in many 
points ; our knowledge itself may be but fragmen- 
tary; but our religious interests will find all that 
is necessary to attach them to Christ as the ground 
of salvation and the archetype of holiness." x 

J I have quoted from the author's Introduction, ed. of Harper Bros., 
N. Y., 1851. 



258 Modern Religious Thought. 

Probably the most important of the recent 
lives of Christ, from the conservative standpoint, 
is that of Bernhard Weiss, professor of theology 
in Berlin. He breaks most decidedly with the 
Tubingen criticism, in opposition to his colleague 
Professor Pfleiderer, in defending the Johannean 
authorship of the Fourth Gospel — regarding it 
as superior to the Synoptics in authoritative value. 
He rejects emphatically the attempt to "mediate" 
the mutually exclusive positions of naturalism 
and supernaturalism. " Between a supernatural- 
ism which believes in the actuality of an objective 
divine revelation and of miracle in the proper 
sense, and the standpoint which regards both as 
inadmissible, there can be as little historical 
mediation as between the conception of Christ as 
a mere man, and the Christ worshiped by the 
Christian Church from the beginning as her divine 
Mediator and Redeemer." 1 

Weiss suggests a consideration which tends to 
remove the fundamental objection against the 
miraculous which we found in Reimarus. " From 
the religious standpoint it has been attempted to 
find grounds for the objection that it would be a 
depreciation of God's creation and therefore of 

1 Life of Christ, vol. i, Dedication, p. xi. 



Neander and Weiss. 259 

the Creator if from the earliest beginning the 
universe could not perfect its development by its 
inherent forces, but constantly, or at least at this 
one point, required the intervention of the great 
Master-workman. This objection would be quite 
relevant if we were treating of a phase in the 
ordinary development of the world. Not only, 
however, the apostolical announcement of Christ, 
but also every page of our evangelical tradition, 
proclaims the aim of Jesus' appearance to have 
been the bringing of salvation to a lost world. 
Jt is here supposed that the development of 
humanity had taken an abnormal direction, that 
it had been turned away from the appointed goal 
instead of approaching it, and that by itself it 
could neither return to where it was, find the 
right track, nor reach the goal." x The force of 
this objection to miracles, so influential during 
the past century, lies evidently in the pantheistic 
view which destroys the human power of choice 
and self-direction, and so makes sin, in any real 
sense, impossible, and an objective historical re- 
demption unnecessary. 

1 Life of Christ, vol. i, p. 199. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE MEDIATING SCHOOL. 

ry^HE most widely known theologian of the 
" mediating " school is probably Isaac 
August Dorner (1809-1884). He studied phil- 
osophy and theology at Tubingen when Baur's 
influence was at its height, and his thoughtful and 
religious nature early set for itself the task of 
reconciling traditional Christianity with the well- 
established results of modern culture. The fruit 
of his efforts is a system of theology in which 
nearly all the traditional theological forms are 
retained, but the effect of the author's early 
Hegelian associations is apparent in a " reconcilia- 
tion " of the old and the new, which one is at last 
constrained to admit is largely a wordy ambiguity. 
Dorner lays great stress upon the doctrine of the 
Trinity, and his statement of it is essentially 
Hegelian. " The doctrine of the divine attributes 
leads back to the Trinity as it were to its under- 
lying truth. In order to be the actual and abso- 
lute Primary Life, Knowledge, and Goodness, the 

260 



The Mediating School. 261 

Godhead must be thought as self-originating and 
self-conscious, just as he must be thought as 
voluntary love. This is only possible by the 
Godhead's eternally distinguishing Himself from 
Himself and always returning to Himself from 
his other Self ; that is, by God's being triune." l 

Dorner's name has been brought prominently 
before the American public in connection with 
the "probation controversy " in the Congrega- 
tional Church. The "new orthodoxy," the lead- 
ing representatives of which are associated with 
Andover Theological Seminary, have attached 
themselves largely to Dorner's theology, and have 
made his views of the future state prominent in 
the discussions of the Congregational Church for 
the past ten years. In Dorner's eschatology " the 
intermediate state " between death and the final 
judgment plays an important part. The spiritual 
perfection and bliss of believers is not consum- 
mated until the end of the world ; the final issues 
of everlasting life and death are not fixed until 
the second advent of Christ and the judgment. 
In the interval, believers may progress towards 
sinless perfection, and it is possible that souls 
" not yet ripe for judgment " may turn to God in 

1 System of Christian Doctrine, vol. i, p. 412, Clark's trans. 



262 Modem Religious Thought. 

penitence and faith. Dorner admits that this 
doctrine must rest largely on grounds of infer- 
ence and reason. " Holy Scripture says nothing 
expressly on this point with the exception of 
the passages in the First Epistle of Peter, and 
indeed of all those passages according to which 
the gospel must be preached to all, and God's 
purpose of grace applies to all." 1 

Dorner argues the point at considerable length 
in the fourth volume of his System of Christian 
Doctrine. 2 " The absoluteness of Christianity 
demands that no one be judged before Christian- 
ity has been made accessible and brought home to 
him. But this is the case in this life with mil- 
lions of human beings. Moreover, those dying in 
childhood have not been able to decide personally 
for Christianity. . . . The descent into Hades 
implies that a salvation through knowledge of 
the gospel is possible also to the departed. Chris- 
tian grace is designed for human beings, not for 
inhabitants of earth. It is not said: He that 
hears not shall be damned ; but : He that believes 
not. Jesus seeks the lost ; lost are to be sought 
also in the kingdom of the dead. The opposite 
view leads to an absolute decree of rejection in 

1 System of Christian Doctrine, vol. iv, p. 405. 2 pp. 408-410. 



The Mediating School, 263 

reference to all who have died and die as heathen, 
whereas Christian grace is universal." 1 

An interesting thinker, also associated with 
the mediating school, is Richard Rothe (1799- 
1867), after 1839 professor at Heidelberg. He 
developed a theory of the relation of the Church 
to the State which is of interest in view of our 
prevalent discussions as to Christian socialism. 
Jesus aimed to establish the kingdom of God, 
and this kingdom is the end of all Christian 
effort. It is an error, however, to identify this 
kingdom with the Church, for the State, which for 
Rothe embraces the whole of the moral activity 
of man, more perfectly represents, or should more 
perfectly represent, the coming kingdom. The 
mission of the Church is to regenerate the State 
and all civil society, and so to be gradually 
merged into the State. When the State is thus 
supreme, in the moral as well as the civil sphere, 
science will have an entirely religious character, 
theology and philosophy will become one, the 
sentiment of worship will be cultivated by means 
of art, and especially by means of the theater, 

iDorner himself did not regard the Probation doctrine as an impor- 
tant element in his system, and was displeased by the prominence 
given to it in this country. I give space to the discussion of this theory, 
however, because to most American readers Dorner's name is known in 
connection with the Probation controversy. 



264 Modern Religious Thought. 

purified and made religious in its influence. It is 
evident that Rothe's " State " is of too ideal a 
character to find its counterpart in our present 
imperfect world ; so that he might better use the 
common and traditional term, the kingdom of 
God, to characterize the future perfect society. 
There appears in Rothe that confounding of the 
ideal state or social condition with the kingdom of 
God so common in the Christian socialists of our 
day, who are usually not quite clear as to whether 
they are aiming at the kingdom of God or the 
socialistic State. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE RITSCHLIAN SCHOOL. 

T I ^HE head of the Ritschlian or New- Kantian 
school was Albrecht Ritschl, late professor 
of theology at Gottingen. 

"A new school has arisen between the medi- 
ating and the liberal schools, and now takes a 
distinct place. This latest school of German theol- 
ogy, attaching itself to Kant, professes itself at 
the same time to be directly descended from 
Luther and Schleiermacher, and it aims at turning 
the inheritance of these great masters of the 
spiritual life to the advantage of the young gener- 
ations. Its professed object is to overcome in a 
definitive manner the sterile antagonism between 
supernaturalism and rationalism, or between faith 
and science ; and to finally conquer an inde- 
pendent province for the religious consciousness, 
by disengaging religion from all essential associa- 
tion with metaphysics, with the natural sciences, 
and with historic criticism." 1 

1 Lichtenfelder, Hist, of Ger. Theol., p. 576. 

265 



266 Modern Religious Thought. 

The characteristic aim of the Ritschlian theol- 
ogy is to construct a distinctively Christian system 
of truth, repudiating the authority of science and 
philosophy in the religious sphere, and proceeding 
from the testimony of Christian consciousness and 
the revelation of God in Christ as recorded in 
Scripture. 

The school of Ritschl is called the New-Kantian. 
It attaches great importance to Kant's philosophi- 
cal work, as effecting a separation between the 
moral and the intellectual. In knowledge we are 
limited wholly to experience, can attain to no 
ultimate reality ; hence philosophy can pass no 
judgments upon ultimate spiritual verities, and 
man must follow his moral intuitions, as confirmed 
and intensified by the revealed truths of Chris- 
tianity. In speculative thought, one must rigidly 
distinguish subjective feeling from objective fact ; 
in the moral realm, feeling is a positive guide to 
truth. In the religious sphere, what ought to be 
must be — judgments of worth, not the conclu- 
sions of logical evidence, are the supreme and 
controlling principles. Hence Schleiermacher's 
attempt to separate theology and philosophy 
seems an accomplished fact. Ritschl admits, 1 

iTheologie und Metaphysik, 1881. 



The Ritsehlian School, 267 

however, that the theologian must have a philo- 
sophical theory of knowledge ; but this theory 
should be the Kant-Lotzian theory which Ritschl 
himself has adopted. 

This principle of worth-judgments serves to 
solve the difficulties and contradictions of the 
moral life. Involved in the doubt and struggle of 
error and sin, we yet believe, on moral rather than 
intellectual grounds, in a perfect truth and a 
supreme good or happiness as existing and as 
attainable for men. God, freedom, and immortal- 
ity are thus assumed as postulates necessary to 
give completeness and satisfying content to the 
moral life. 

A theology based on feeling would seem to be 
in danger of fanatical extremes ; but Ritschl, like 
Schleiermacher, repudiates all mystical tendencies, 
and asserts that the historic Christ and the historic 
teachings of the Church are alone the source of the 
genuine religious life. Here arises a controversy 
with the Hegelian school, as Pfleiderer, who asserts 
a constant and immanent revelation of God in the 
sense of Hegel's " Witness of the Spirit." x The 
anomalous situation, therefore, arises that the 
Ritschlians, starting from feeling, emphasize the 

!pp. 197, 198 sup. 



268 Modern Religious Thought. 

genuinely historic in Christianity, and the Hegel- 
ians, starting from intellect or reason, assert a 
mystical communion with and knowledge of God. 
When we examine it, however, we find Ritschl's 
historic Christianity as illusory as Hegel's mysti- 
cism. Ritschl's Christ is essentially Schleier- 
macher's, already shown by Strauss to be ideal 
rather than historic. 

It is only necessary to suggest, in a word, 
Ritschl's teaching on two or three of the important 
doctrines. 

He gives no dogmatic statement as to the origin 
of sin. We experience it as a fact of our personal 
life, for which we feel responsible. Faith has no 
knowledge or concern as to whether any will 
finally remain in the sinful state, and so be forever 
lost. 

Christ, as the perfect revealer of God and 
founder of the kingdom of God, may be said to 
be divine. As with Schleiermacher, Christian 
consciousness does not raise curious and unan- 
swerable questions as to his ultimate nature and 
peculiar relation to God. 

Ritschl holds the moral influence view of the 
atonement. God forgives as Father ; the only 
influence necessary is to convince men that God 



The Ritschlian School. 269 

is forgiving love, and induce them to turn to him 
in penitence and faith. This influence Christ 
brought to bear upon his disciples through his 
own personality, while in the flesh, and now he 
acts on the Christian through the Church. 

Ritschl's system is a compound of Schleier- 
macher's Christian consciousness, Kant's practical 
reason, and Lotze's notion of " worth-judgments," 
read into the New Testament with a supreme 
disregard for exegesis and historic sense. The 
attempt is made to supplement the subjectivity of 
Kant's religion of morality by the false and illu- 
sory objectivity of Schleiermacher's Christian 
consciousness ; but instead of Kant's method of 
allegorizing the Scriptures to suit the new theory, 
Ritschl coolly asserts that the New Testament 
writers meant to present Christ, in the Kantian 
sense, as the ethical Redeemer and revealer of 
God. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

CONCLUSION. 

T I ^HE history of doctrine is theology teaching 
by examples. I have failed in my purpose 
in this sketch of modern religious thought, if it is 
necessary to dwell at any length upon the sugges- 
tions of truth it contains for the Church of to-day. 
Each of the main tendencies of German liberal 
thought represents a partial truth which the 
Church should more fully recognize ; and the 
present theological problem is to harmonize these 
fragments in the unity of a well-rounded system. 
Kant, a practical morality ; Hegel, the antithetical 
truth of a living unity with God in spirit and in 
purpose ; Schleiermacher vindicates Christian 
experience as a witness of spiritual truth ; Ritschl 
carries out the same idea in denying the right of 
an un-Christian or anti-Christian philosophy to 
dominate the thought of the Church. The error 
common to all these schools is in yielding to 
science the assumption of an iron inflexibility of 
natural law, which excludes the supernatural, so 

270 



Conclusion. 271 

that with Kant and Hegel the miraculous is 
abandoned, and with Schleiermacher and Bitschl 
it appears only at one point — in a revealer of 
God. This revealer of God is prudently veiled 
from the eyes of the profane by the incense of 
worship ; he is an incomprehensible Unding about 
whose real nature no questions must be asked; 
he is divine to faith but human to reason, so that 
we have a reappearance of the position which was 
properly regarded as the reductio ad absurdum of 
Scholasticism, namely, that a proposition may be 
true in theology and false in philosophy. 

If we combine the truths represented by the 
partial tendencies just mentioned, and supplement 
them by the necessary religious assumption that 
God is not excluded by his own laws from his own 
world, we have the elements necessary for con- 
structing a system of theology which shall be 
rationally satisfactory and yet consonant with 
Scripture, Christian experience, and the essentials 
of the traditional teaching of the Church. It 
would not be necessary for an adherent of such a 
system to defy the authority of science and phil- 
osophy when exercised in their proper spheres; 
it would not be necessary to wave off criticism 
from the Scriptures as concerned with a fairyland 



272 Modern Religious Thought, 

where the laws of reason are annulled, and things 
are believed because they are absurd. It would 
be entirely proper and necessary, however, to 
demand that science and philosophy set up no 
unproved assumptions which render a revealed 
religion impossible, and that criticism do not pro- 
ceed to test miraculous Christian history by pre- 
suppositions which deny the miraculous. It would 
not be necessary, for example, for the theologian 
to take the unscientific position that the story of 
Jonah and the whale is veritable history, because 
it happens to be in the commonly received canon ; 
but he must demand that, if criticism will prove 
the book to be allegory or poem, it shall be on 
other grounds than the mere fact of the extraor- 
dinary contents of the book. This simple and 
proper demand, rigidly enforced, will render the 
greater portion of the advanced critical literature 
of the past century practically worthless for a 
Christian believer. 

It is therefore evident, as I have suggested here 
and there through this work, that the conflict of 
Christianity with modern secular thought rests at 
bottom upon certain antagonistic principles and 
presuppositions which have always been operative 
in human history. Here is the present world — a 



Conclusion. 273 

goodly and joyous world ; here is man, with noble 
powers of thought and reason and a wide sphere 
for worthy achievement. Let us incite man to 
high endeavor by the loftiest conception of his 
gifts and possibilities, owning no limit to his 
possible supremacy in the physical or intellectual 
worlds. Let us erect a noble temple where 
Reason shall be enthroned ; let us adorn life with 
art and luxury ; let us live a life, free, sunny, and 
joyous, and let there be no death's head at the 
feast to bring vague fears as to the unknown 
beyond. This is the type of thought I have 
designated as the Greek. The contrasting type 
is represented for us by medieval Christianity. 
Human nature is the ruin of what should have 
been a noble work, the reason is perverted, the 
moral nature vitiated, the present world a vale of 
penitential tears — a moment of probation, swiftly 
vanishing into an eternity of joy or pain. And 
however extreme this view of Christianity may 
be, any true conception of Christianity must 
retain the " other-worldly " element — " we have 
here no abiding city " ; so that the contrasting 
types of the Greek and Christian remain. The 
history of Christian theology is the struggle of 
these conflicting views of life. The Greek Logos 



274 Modern Religious Thought. 

[Reason] religion gained a firm foothold in the 
early Church, especially through the theology of 
Origen ; in Augustine appeared the reaction of 
the genuine Christian spirit, and the conditions 
of the middle ages produced an extremely one- 
sided development of the other-worldly type. 
The Italian Renaissance is a passionate protest 
against this extreme, and though suppressed by 
the Reformation and the counter-reformation in 
the Roman Church, it is yet prophetic of the 
conflict of Christianity with modern culture. 
The Greek type has been, perhaps, the dominant 
ideal in the science, philosophy, and literature of 
the past century, and the result has been a min- 
gled evil and good. Good, in that man is urged 
to esteem himself lord of this lower world, and 
so to attempt and achieve great things in all lines 
of human endeavor. Evil, in that the boasted 
achievements of our civilization rest only upon 
the earth, the comfort and inspiration of a 
spiritual faith are ignored, and religion erects an 
altar to an unknown God, or is rationalized into 
a system of ethics. The religious problem of the 
modern world, as I have remarked above, is to 
harmonize these conflicting ideals and views of 
life — to bring into proper adjustment in a higher 



Conclusion. 275 

and permanent unity the glorified heaven of the 
Christian and the glorified earth of the Greek. 

In this work I have presented nothing, I of 
course admit, which directly substantiates the 
doctrines of the Christian religion ; the work can 
be of value to Christian apologetics only as it 
makes plain the failure of the modern attacks 
upon our traditional faith. It is possible, as far 
as concerns anything I have advanced here, that 
Christianity may yet be overthrown and take 
its place on the roll of dead religions. I do 
claim for this work, however, that it makes clear 
that this destructive work has not yet been 
accomplished — that modern science and philoso- 
phy have developed nothing which, fairly con- 
sidered, invalidates the claim of Christianity to 
the intellectual, moral, and spiritual allegiance of 
mankind. The advance-guard of modern culture 
may regard Christianity as obsolescent; but a 
little careful examination of the real facts of the 
situation will show plainly enough (to quote 
Bishop Butler's words concerning Christianity, 
written in somewhat similar circumstances) " that 
any reasonable man may be as much assured, as 
he is of his own being, that it is not so clear a 
case, that there is nothing in it." 1 

1 Analogy, Advertisement. 



NOTE. 

The Greek Logos Doctrine.— The Logos as a philosophical 
principle appears first with Heraclitus. Logos in Greek meant 
primarily a word, a proposition ; and secondarily the faculty of 
the mind which is manifested in speech — reason. Heraclitus indi- 
cates the principle of order in the world by Logos, after the analogy 
of reason as the ruling faculty of the mind. His Logos, however, 
is not self-conscious, but is identified in a pantheistic or materialistic 
way with the general world-process. The Platonic school, follow- 
ing Anaxagoras probably, designates the principle of reason in 
nature as Nous instead of Logos. In the Stoic school we find again 
Heraclitus' Logos, except that providential care for the world and 
mankind is ascribed to it. Here are apparent points of resemblance 
between Greek and Hebrew conceptions, of which Philo availed 
himself when he sought to reconcile the two. Later Jewish teachers 
held to the creation of the world by the divine "Word or "Wisdom, 
and that God acted on the world through subordinate agents — 
angels, demons, etc. Philo therefore asserts that this series of subor- 
dinate powers between God and the world, called by the Jews 
"Word, Wisdom, Angels, etc., was what the Greeks had indistinctly 
in mind when they spoke of the Logos. This early attempt to recon- 
cile the Hebrew religion with Greek thought is extremely sugges- 
tive, as forecasting the result of the modern attempt to harmonize 
Christianity with the Greek conceptions of the Renaissance. The 
results in the two cases are perfectly analogous : God, instead of 
a personal heavenly Father, becomes a pantheistic first principle ; 
God administers the world, not through personal spirits, angels, 
etc., but through natural forces; and God reveals himself not 
through miracle, but immanently, in nature and in man. The 
problem of Philo and of Hegel is essentially the same, and the 
outcome is essentially the same. The movement is from the his- 
torical, definite, and personal to the vague, impersonal, and 

pantheistic. 

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